Daily Reading for January 24 • Ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi, First Woman Priest in the Anglican Communion, 1944
The first woman priest in the Anglican Communion was not an American. In a curious parallel to the seating of Elizabeth Dyer in the House of Deputies in 1946, the upheaval of wartime had also made possible the 1944 ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi by Ronald O. Hall, the bishop of Hong Kong, to provide priestly ministrations to Chinese Americans under the Japanese occupation. When word of the ordination reached England, Bishop Hall was roundly denounced and Li Tim-Oi agreed to suspend her sacramental ministry to protect Hall from punitive action. Her subsequent disappearance throughout the years China was closed to the West made it easy for the Anglican Communion to resist dealing with the implications of her ordination, but Li Tim-Oi’s ordination reminds us that the issue was by no means an American invention of the 1960s. In fact, women’s ordination to the priesthood had been urged by women’s rights activists on both sides of the Atlantic since the turn of the century, and was first alluded to in a Lambeth Conference report of 1920. . . .
On February 11, 1989, before a jubilant crowd of eight thousand people in the Hynes Auditorium in Boston, Barbara Clementine Harris was consecrated suffragan bishop of the most populous diocese in the American church. . . . Everything about the service testified to the fact that the old order was changing. The preacher was Harris’s mentor, Paul Washington, rector of the Church of the Advocate which had hosted the Philadelphia ordinations fifteen years earlier. Joining Bishop Harris around the altar to concelebrate the Eucharist were Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first Anglican woman ordained to the priesthood in 1944, and Carter Heyward, one of the Philadelphia Eleven. . . . A woman had become a bishop, and the episcopacy had been transformed: no longer a male preserve, it had become an image of human leadership within a community of diverse men and women united in Christ’s service.
From New Wine: The Story of Women Transforming Leadership and Power in the Episcopal Church by Pamela W. Darling (Cowley Publications, 1994).