MDI event to laud ‘Philadelphia 11’ priest Swanson

BAR HARBOR – One of the first women to be ordained an Episcopal priest will be remembered this month at a four-day event at St. Saviour’s Episcopal Church.

“A Weekend for Liberty & Justice for Women” will celebrate the life and work of the Rev. Katrina Swanson, who died of colon cancer Aug. 27, 2005, at her home in Manset village. She was 70.

The fourth generation of her family to enter the ministry, Swanson was one of the “Philadelphia 11,” a group of women ordained in an irregular and controversial ceremony in that city on July 29, 1974.

The event to honor her

was scheduled this month to mark the 32nd anniversary of the women’s ordinations.

It will begin on Thursday evening, July 27, with an art show and poetry reading. It will culminate in a 10 a.m. Sunday, July 30, funeral conducted by five of Swanson’s Philadelphia 11 colleagues and Bishop Chilton Knudsen, the first woman to head the Episcopal Diocese of Maine.

“It was Katrina’s wish that her sister priests and the bishop stand together as equals at God’s altar,” said the Rev. George Swanson, Swanson’s husband for 47 years and a retired Episcopal priest.

Her family planned the event to honor Katrina Swanson’s pioneering spirit as well as her commitment to social justice and the women’s movement, her husband said last year.

He has invited people to brainstorm about how “to move America and the world toward complete justice for women” at an “Open Congress on Liberty and Justice” to be held July 29.

One of the goals for the weekend is to create a mission statement and set other goals for use of the fund that was created in his wife’s memory last year.

“Sure, it’s pretty ambitious,” he said, “but if not now, when? And if not here, where?”

A graduate of Radcliffe College, Katrina Swanson was ordained by her father, the late Bishop Edward Welles II, who had advocated the ordination of women in a book published in England in 1928.

Swanson’s status as a priest became official after the Episcopal Church approved the ordination of women in 1976. Two years later, she became rector of St. John’s Parish in Union City, N.J., where she launched bilingual Spanish and English services and established an after-school program for children.

Until then, Swanson’s path was not simple.

When she returned home to Kansas City, Mo., after the Philadelphia ordination, her husband, who was rector of an inner-city parish there, had to fire her as his unpaid assistant priest to keep his job.

Subsequently, Katrina Swanson was hired for a dollar a year as assistant priest at Church of the Liberation in St. Louis.

In 1975, she agreed to a three-month suspension from her deacon’s ministry under the threat of an ecclesiastical trial. She was the only one of the Philadelphia 11 and the ordaining bishops to receive ecclesiastical punishment.

Slowly attitudes changed, and in 1979 she and her husband moved to the Diocese of Newark, N.J., where other Episcopal women were working. For the next 17 years, she served in Union City, N.J. Her husband’s church was a mile away on the same road in nearby Jersey City.

In 1996, Swanson retired to Manset, where her husband continues to live.

In addition to George Swanson, two other members of the “irregulars” live in Maine.

The Rev. Merrill Bittner, 58, of Bethel gave up being a parish priest to work as a guidance counselor in adult education. The Rev. Alison Cheek, 78, retired to Tenants Harbor after serving a church in Massachusetts.

Both are expected to preside at Katrina Swanson’s funeral.

For information, call George Swanson at 244-0579, or visit www.katrinasdream.org.