50 years ago, 11 women went around the country asking Episcopal churches to ordain them as priests. Only a North Philly Black church agreed.

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The Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia was the only Episcopal Church in the country in 1974 that agreed to ordain women as priests.

50 years ago, 11 women went around the country asking Episcopal churches to ordain them as priests. Only a North Philly Black church agreed.

Paul Washington, the Church of the Advocate rector and a Philadelphia activist fixture who later served on the MOVE Commission, played a crucial part in the decision and participated in the ordination. The 1974 ordination was seen as an act of civil disobedience and was highly controversial at the time.

The film notes that the bishop of Kentucky declared he’d respond to the ordination of women by returning to his home state to “ordain the great racehorse Secretariat.”The Episcopal House of Bishops voted to invalidate the ordinations, punish the bishops, and take up the issue at the Church Convention in 1976.

Their story is so historically underknown that Margo Guernsey, the film’s director, was unaware of it until shortly before beginning work on the project. “All of that archival footage in the church, to see it projected in the same space, was really quite moving,” Guernsey said of the premiere.

 

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