The Rev. Katrina Swanson, who challenged centuries of church law in the 1970s as one of a group of women ordained as the first female Episcopal priests, has died. She was 70.
Swanson died Aug. 27 of colon cancer at her home in Manset, Maine, said her husband, the Rev. George Gaines Swanson, who also is an Episcopal priest.
"Katrina Swanson was a pioneer, and without her, I wouldn't be here," the Rt. Rev. Chilton R. Knudsen, the Episcopal bishop of Maine, said in a statement that saluted the priest as a believer in orthodox faith and equal rights for women. Knudsen is one of 12 female bishops in the Episcopal Church today.
On July 29, 1974, Swanson's father was among the bishops who defied church authorities to preside over the ordination of Swanson and 10 other women during a three-hour service at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia.
"In spite of the circus atmosphere, it was a very reverent event and very thrilling," the Rev. Suzanne Hiatt, who was among those ordained, recalled in 1994 of the ceremony that drew joyous shouts and occasional boos. (Hiatt died in 2002.)
Two weeks later, the church declared the ordinations invalid. The women were not allowed to lead services and were sanctioned for violating church law.
In a plea bargain that allowed Swanson to avoid a church trial, she was forbidden from wearing clerical garb and suspended for three months from working as a deacon in Kansas City, Mo.
To keep his job and quiet the controversy, Swanson's husband was forced to fire her as his unpaid assistant priest at his inner-city parish.
She received a pay raise when a priest at a poor parish in St. Louis hired her as an assistant priest for a dollar a year, a token gesture to show she was officially on staff.
Although she encountered "great hostility" at first, Swanson viewed the trailblazing ordination as the unavoidable push the Episcopal Church needed to accept women as priests and bishops.
"We tried a whole lot of legal ways to help it happen within the church," Swanson once told the Associated Press. "Unjust mechanisms [were] used over and over again. People were sending the issue back for more study and more study."
The Episcopal Church approved the ordination of women in 1976, and the women known as the irregular 11 became officially recognized as priests.
In the United States, the Episcopal Church now has more than 4,000 female priests and deacons, according to church statistics. The church does not keep a separate count of female priests.
