Priesthood in a Women’s Community

by Sister Helen Loder SSM

It is now five years since the Church of England’s General Synod voted to allow women to be ordained as priests. In this article, a sister of the Society of St Margaret, from St Saviour’s Priory, Haggerston, reflects on the impact her own priesting has had within her community. Sister Helen SSM was professed in 1970 and was ordained priest in 1995.

Any reflection on priesthood in a women’s community is bound to be determined by certain factors: the brevity of the actual experience of such priesthood, the percentage of acceptance of women’s ministry within a community, and the style of leadership already in place. The context of this reflection is a community in which one sister has been ordained priest for a mere two years, where the acceptance of such ministry has been unanimous (although it is important to note that the community is an autonomous house of a larger Society in which the two integrities are represented), and where the structure of authority has undergone a radical change in the last six years.
Priesthood in community presents the Church with a very real opportunity to explore its prophetic rôle. In the first place, God’s call to such priesthood comes from within the community it seeks to serve, with the Chapter’s consent and approval. The response to such a call, and responsibility for it, is therefore not carried by the individual alone, but by all its members. In this way, priestly ministry, from the start, becomes just one part of the recognition of the ministry of each, and part of the mutuality of respect and care for all within the community, rather than a vocation and rôle set apart from the rest. The result of such an experience has been not the down-grading of priestly ministry, but a new recognition of the value and validity of the part played by each sister within her community from the housekeeper to the gardener to one who cleans the toilets.
Priesthood has often in the past been equated with leadership and the exercise of power. Our community, however, has already moved from a hierarchical structure to exploring a style of leadership which, while it brings direction and unity to the group, also exists to facilitate the community’s ability to discern its charism and contemporary implications for itself (Joan Chittister, The Fire in these Ashes, Sheed & Ward, Kansas City, 1995, p 131). In this context, there need be no tension between the leadership of the community and the authority given at ordination: both co-exist as part of the same valuing and affirmation of the responsibility of each member to discern the will of God. The opportunity of exercising priesthood without leadership has a prophetic quality, particularly important to the Church today as it seeks to re-evaluate the nature of ordination. As Penny Jamieson, Bishop of Dunedin in New Zealand, comments on the contribution by women in non-stipendiary ministry:

‘They seek to be priests within and for their communities, but not necessarily to equate their priesthood with leadership. I have a strong feeling here that, in the ministry these women are offering, God is doing a new thing, the dimensions of which we cannot yet see.’

(Penny Jamieson, Living at the Edge, Mowbray, London, 1997, p 50)

Perhaps the most radical change that priesthood in community brings (and perhaps the most alarming to some members of the episcopate) is its sacramental autonomy. A women’s community with its own priesthood is no longer dependent on the priestly ministry from outside. This has had two major effects: now when priests from outside are invited to celebrate the Eucharist (and we have gratefully retained our rota of local male and female priests who come in five days a week), they know it is no longer from necessity, but because we value their individual ministry. Similarly, Eucharists which we celebrate together with one of our Sisters as priest takes on a new dimension, previously never before experienced in the history of women’s communities in England. For just as the call to priesthood and the response to that call has been seen as the responsibility of the whole community, so celebrating the Eucharist is seen not so much as the responsibility of the individual, but something in which, in a new way, each increasingly plays an equal, if different part. The well-known words of Michael Ramsey on a priest’s intercessions now take on a new meaning:

‘It is like Aaron of old who went into the holy of holies wearing a breastplate with jewels representing the tribes of Israel whose priest he was: he went near to God with the people on his heart.’

(Michael Ramsey, The Christian Priest Today, SPCK, London, 1972, p 15)

Our experience today is that each of us is called to approach God corporately at the altar with the people in our hearts, for celebrating the Eucharist together within community provides an opportunity to explore new liturgies, new ways of celebrating our particular vocation and charism, new ways of exercising our ministry within the sacrament.
Another effect of priesthood within the community is that it highlights the fact that it is now possible for women’s communities to choose whether or not to have an outside chaplain/warden (a rôle never needed by most men’s communities) as the liturgical, and similar, functions which he had been accustomed to perform are gradually taken on from within the community. Thus, in our community, the chaplain’s rôle had already for many years become less as Sisters became free to choose their own confessors and spiritual directors, and once the Mother took on the clothing of novices and the reception of vows at Profession, and we became responsible for counting the votes at elections, etc., the chaplain himself proposed that his rôle had become redundant. Now having a Sister celebrating at a Profession Eucharist, giving the last rites and taking a Sister’s Funeral Eucharist feels not only appropriate but part of the same development. (There is no plan for hearing confessions within community; it is neither necessary nor desirable and, given our tradition, would border on the incestuous.)
Finally, although priesthood within community, for the first time in our history, places one of our members under direct episcopal authority (her ministry has to be licensed by the local bishop), it is still an opportunity to explore priesthood and community on the edge. Many of us might feel that being a woman already places us at the edge of society; having a woman priest in community gives us a new way of working on the frontiers (where as a member of a Religious Community we are already called to be) amongst the dispossessed, the despised, the forgotten. Moreover, the priest’s spirituality becomes one of vulnerability; it is a humbling task to stand up and preside at the Eucharist amongst Sisters who experience only too often one’s weaknesses, shortcomings and sins: not much scope for pride or relishing status here. The edge is the frontier, the place of transfiguration, for, as John O’Donohue wrote,

‘The edge is a precarious place. Here change continually creates new perception. Here ideas stay alert and tentative in their urgency to mirror the new shapes that come across the frontier.’

The Way (1995/83)