Out of the Ordinary Manset woman recalls path as one of the Episcopal ‘irregular 11’

The Rev. Katrina Martha Welles Swanson did not intend to make history or blaze a trail or create controversy.

But to become an ordained minister, she had to do all three.

Swanson, 69, was ordained as an Episcopal priest on July 29, 1974, in Philadelphia. Church law at the time prevented women from serving as priests. She was one of 11 women ordained that day who are remembered as the “irregular 11.”

She will celebrate the 30th anniversary of her ordination by conducting the 10 a.m. service Sunday at St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church in Bar Harbor. She retired to Manset in 1996, but worships regularly at the historic stone church in the center of town. Her sermon will include a question-and-answer time with the congregation.

“We have a lot to be thankful for [for] women in all kinds of ministry in the U.S. and around the world,” Swanson said this week, describing how women’s roles in the church have changed in the past 30 years.

Swanson is the fourth generation in her family to enter ministry. During the years her father served as an Episcopal priest, she lived in Boston, Albany, N.Y., Alexandria, Va., Buffalo, N.Y., and Kansas City, Mo. Her ties to Maine, however, go back to her first year of life.

“When I was 6 months old, my parents took me to the summit of Mount Katahdin,” she said. “I went up the mountain in a sling made out of a sheet that was tied around my dad’s neck. My parents bought land in Manset in the 1940s and, later, built the house. This became our home, and it’s been a wonderful place. We would come here when we were between jobs. It’s always been a haven.”

Swanson said that as a child she spent long hours outside or at church with her father. As a girl, when she pondered what her future would be, she often thought, “If I were a boy, I’d be a priest.”

That option was open to few women in any denomination in the 1950s. So like her fellow “irregulars,” Swanson went to college believing ordained ministry was not in her future. Her father, however, had advocated ordination of women in a book published in England in 1928.

After graduating with a degree in sociology from Radcliffe College, she married the Rev. George Gaines Swanson, now 76, and settled in as a homemaker.

The debate over the ordination of women began percolating in the 1960s, but Swanson at first opposed the idea because it was not what she was used to, she said. She changed her mind after she and her husband ministered in Botswana, a country in southern Africa about the size of France.

“In some of the more distant congregations that were sprinkled around the countryside, women had to hire men, if there were none in the church, to lead Sunday services, even to do the [Scripture] readings,” she said. “These little groups of women did the best they could to keep these churches going, and it seemed like such a waste of woman power to have to hire someone when they could have done it. That experience opened up my mind to ordination.”

When she returned to the United States, Swanson began studying to become a deacon, or ordained lay minister. The Episcopal Church opened that role to women in 1965. Slowly, she became part of a group advocating the ordination of women.

In 1973, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church defeated a resolution in favor of women’s ordination as priests. It almost had passed two years earlier after the church spent nearly a decade studying the question.

In 1974 Swanson was ordained as a deacon. Tired of waiting, Swanson and 10 others then agreed to be ordained as priests in Philadelphia by two retired bishops and one who had recently resigned.

Their joy was short-lived. The “irregular” priests were not allowed to lead services and were sanctioned by their bishops for violating church law.

Swanson, who was living in Kansas City, Mo., was suspended for three months from working as a deacon and forbidden by her bishop to wear clerical garb. The next five years were difficult for Swanson and her husband. Although the ordination of women was approved at the Episcopal Church’s 1976 General Convention and the “irregular 11” were recognized in the following years, Swanson at first did not have a church.

That changed in 1979 when she and her husband moved to the Diocese of Newark, N.J., where other Episcopal women were working. For the next 17 years until her retirement, she served as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Union City, N.J. Her husband’s church was a mile away on the same road, in Jersey City, N.J.

In addition to Swanson, two other members of the “irregulars” live in Maine. The Rev. Merrill Bittner, 57, of Bethel gave up being a parish priest to work as a guidance counselor in adult education. The Rev. Alison Cheek, 77, retired to Tenants Harbor after serving a church in Massachusetts.

Swanson said that she hasn’t followed closely the Episcopal Church’s recent controversy over the consecration of the U.S. church’s first openly gay bishop.

“Many people have said that it is deja vu all over again,” she said. “Many people are asking, ‘Haven’t we learned to be accepting yet? Be more Christlike?’ But, isn’t this history?'”

The Rev. Katrina Martha Swanson will speak at 10 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 8, at St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church, 41 Mount Desert St., BarHarbor.