The Rev. Mary Michael Simpson, the first Episcopal nun to be ordained a priest and the first ordained woman to preach a sermon in Westminster Abbey, died Wednesday last in Augusta, Georgia. She was 85.
Daniel E Slotnik writing in The New York Times states:
The cause was kidney failure, said Sister Carol Andrew of the Order of Saint Helena, of which Canon Simpson was a member.
Canon Simpson was ordained a priest on Jan. 9, 1977, and installed as a canon of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan later that year, when the role of women in the Episcopal Church was a matter of heated debate.
Even though the Church of England said it had no official objection to women joining the priesthood in the Anglican Communion — which includes the Episcopal Church — lay opinion and the private views of the clergy were often more conservative. By 1978, women had become priests in Anglican Communion churches in the United States, Canada and New Zealand, but not yet in the United Kingdom.
Canon Simpson addressed the issue directly in a sermon at Westminster Abbey on April 2, 1978, in which she asserted that the church treated women like “second-class Christians.”
“Christian creativity for the present age must not depend on male leaders,” she told a gathering of about 700 people. “Woman’s contribution — from women properly trained and authorized — is essential.”
Now, women may be ordained in nearly all dioceses of the Episcopal Church, and its current presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, is the first woman to lead the church. And other groups are involved in their own struggle for parity. The Anglican Communion is currently deeply divided over same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay bishops.
Mary Michael Simpson was born on Dec. 1, 1925, in Evansville, Ind. She was raised a Methodist but was drawn to the Episcopal Church in college.
She wanted to study Episcopal theology after she graduated in the mid-1940s. Episcopal seminaries were closed to women, so she attended the New York School for Deaconesses and Other Church Workers.
She spent three years as a professional church worker, first as an assistant to a college chaplain and later as a missionary in Africa. Afterward, she entered the Order of St. Helena, taking her life vows in 1956.
Canon Simpson did not begin her career with a zeal for ecumenical equality. It was more than 20 years before she began advocating for women in the priesthood.
“My reading and thinking led me to the conclusion that there was no barrier to the ordination of women; it just had not been done,” she wrote in a chapter of “Yes to Women Priests,” a book supporting women’s ordination.
She joined the staff of St. John the Divine, where she began arguing for women in the clergy. While there, she studied psychotherapy and was installed as canon residentiary on Oct. 9, 1977, with the title “canon counselor” and responsibility for all counseling services.
She is survived by a brother, Frank, of Texas City.
Canon Simpson said her parishioners responded both to her arguments for a more inclusive church and to her own role in it.
“Many people — men as well as women — say that though they themselves don’t want to be ordained, it means so much to them to have me at the altar. ‘It means that the church really accepts me — I’m not a second-class citizen,’ ” she wrote.