The Bishop Is a Lady

By Richard N. Ostling

The election of Barbara Harris to be the first woman bishop in America's Episcopal Church, and hence the first in world Anglicanism, has produced great joy among feminists. It has also fostered widespread ecclesiastical warfare against the choice of Harris, a 58-year-old native of Philadelphia, to become the next suffragan bishop of Massachusetts. Conservatives have mounted an unprecedented campaign to prevent consent for the Boston election, which must be approved by the "standing committees" of a majority of U.S. dioceses. But by last week Harris had backing from 56 of the needed 60 dioceses, meaning that she is unstoppable.

The U.S. Episcopal bishops are certain to follow the vote with their own endorsement of Harris, but the conflict is not likely to end with her installation, probably in February. The advent of women as bishops, for one thing, will delay any hoped-for reunion between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism -- by several hundred years, reckons one Anglican ecumenist.* More ! immediate is the serious split that will occur within the 60 million-member Anglican Communion. One side is ready to recognize Harris and subsequent women bishops and to accept the priests they ordain. The other side will refuse. Matters are bound to get even messier as time goes by.

In the U.S., Harris' opponents, including six bishops who head dioceses, are a small if troublesome faction. But elsewhere fully 20 of the 27 autonomous Anglican branches forbid women priests and will doubtless reject women bishops as well. The world leader of Anglicanism, Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, has been forced willy-nilly to join the rejectionists in his role as Primate of the Church of England. Runcie declared last month that unless church law changes, neither he nor any other English hierarch may recognize a woman bishop or the priests she ordains. Communion between the English and American churches survives, Runcie stated, but will now be restricted. The leader of the antiwomen forces, London's Bishop Graham Leonard, says that Harris' election will have a "profound and divisive effect" throughout Anglicanism.

Even if she were not a woman, the elevation of Harris would have caused a ruckus. In fact, gender was barely mentioned during the anti-Harris campaign. For openers, she is apparently the first divorced person ever elected an Anglican bishop. In most nations, that would have prevented her from even becoming a priest. Equally remarkable, says editor H. Boone Porter of the Living Church, she lacks the "conventional qualifications" for the office. Not to say that Harris, who was the top public relations executive for Sun Oil before she decided to become a priest, lacks substantial achievements. But she will be a rarity among bishops in not having a college degree (she took three college courses plus special training for mid-career clergy recruits). Though Harris was a prison chaplain for four years and worked part time at two churches, she has never been the full-time rector of her own parish. "No one made Barbara Harris," says her Philadelphia mentor, the Rev. Paul Washington. "She made herself."

While still a laywoman, Harris led the procession at the 1974 protest ritual in which her church's first women priests were illicitly ordained. During eight years in the priesthood, she has developed a reputation as a bright, articulate activist. Harris, who will be her church's 29th black bishop, is the convener of a coalition of minority and social-action caucuses that seeks to prod the Episcopal Church into what Harris calls "an increased advocacy role and some real risk taking." A prime risk that she favors: acceptance of practicing homosexual clergy.

She is best known in Episcopal circles as the executive director of the Witness, an independent magazine of the church's hard left. In its pages, she has described her own denomination as a "male-dominated racist church," castigated Episcopal "factious fathers" who fear "mitered mammas," branded as "demonic" one conservative church caucus, excoriated numerous Reagan Administration policies, and even dubbed the Gary Hart sex scandal "Tailgate."

Given her confrontational past, Harris has been uncharacteristically circumspect in victory. Says she: "I have been elected bishop of the church, not a symbol or a token." Her emphasis will be on the job that she has been called to do, Harris insists, not on her precedent-shattering election. However, two years ago, Harris observed with typically caustic humor that any woman who joined the Episcopal hierarchy would need "a high tolerance for indecisiveness, an inordinate amount of patience with unimaginative leadership . . . and an appetite for ambiguity." In the coming months, such qualities will surely be tested in Harris herself, and in the fractious Anglican Communion.

FOOTNOTE: *By coincidence, Pope John Paul II decisively rejected women priests in an apostolic letter released six days after Harris' election.

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London and Melissa Ludtke/Boston