Did anyone happen to see the article that appeared in the Toronto Star on October 4, 2025, under the above headline, announcing the appointment of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury? Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London, was chosen as the Church of England’s spiritual leader; her appointment will be made official in a formal ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral in January. What a milestone for a five-hundred-year-old church dominated by a male hierarchy that, in England, ordained its first female priests in 1994 and its first female bishop not until 2015. How I wish I could be there, in the magnificent Canterbury Cathedral, to cheer Sarah on and recognize the many years of contention – indeed, vicious opposition – that lay behind such a momentous shift in policy.
The Anglican Church in Canada, with its roots in the Church of England, was slightly more progressive (but not much) in lifting the age-old patriarchal traditions of a church that started with Henry VIII during the British Reformation of the 16th century, and is still officially headed by the British monarch, King Charles III. In Canada, the first female priests in the Anglican Church were ordained in 1976.
In 1957, when I was eleven years old, I was especially blessed when my friend Mary Lou came into my life. She and her parents and brothers had moved into our neighbourhood, and we met while playing “down the river” – the Humber River ravine near our houses. Over the next few years as our friendship grew, we spent a lot of time together, mostly at her house, where, as the only girl in her family, she was lucky enough to have her own room. (I had three sisters and had to share!) We were both quite the nerds, and one of our many pastimes was to walk to the library on Saturday mornings, select armloads of books, and return to the sanctuary of her bedroom where we would read and discuss our favourites together.
Central to our pre-teen reading was C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series. We read it, not once but many times; we played out scenes from the seven novels that comprise the series; we turned a portion of our nearby wooded Humber valley into our very own Narnia and spent much time there with our fantasies. It was an idyllic time for us. Both Mary Lou and I were raised in churchgoing, Christian families. We were well aware of the clear Christian allegory present in the Narnia books and were heavily influenced by it. I own two editions of the series, which I re-read almost every year. Years later, Mary Lou was to realize how large a part C. S. Lewis and his allegorical Narnia stories played in decisions she made as she grew up.
On November 30, 1976, my childhood friend Mary Lou became the Reverend Mary Louise Lucas, one of the first six women priests ordained by the Anglican Church in Canada.
With great pride in our old friendship of many years ago, I tell the story of her struggle to achieve her ultimate goal of priesthood in the Anglican Church in Canada.
We had overlapped for a couple of years at York University, but lost contact for a while when she went off to Harvard for her post-graduate degrees (Master of Divinity and Master of Public Administration). When I read of her ordination in the Toronto Star (Saturday, Nov. 27, 1976 – I still have the clipping) I called her at Grace Church, St. Catharines, where Bishop of Niagara, the Rt. Rev. John Bothwell, had ordained her. Bob and I went to see her there. We talked about her ordination, and what a difficult, yet joyful, time it was for her. She had received poison pen letters, which today we would call hate-mail, and many people, both colleagues and strangers, had made it clear to her how strongly they disapproved of her resolve to become a priest. She was 100% supported by her parents and brothers, however. Although she wanted to serve in the Toronto Diocese, she was forced to go to Niagara to be ordained because individual bishops had sole power to ordain or not to ordain. Rt. Reverend Lewis Garnsworthy, Bishop of Toronto at the time, had not yet made up his mind. Until he did, Rev. Mary would not be able to function as a priest in Toronto, a situation that caused her much heartache. As far as I could find out, during her thirty-eight-year career as an Anglican priest she never did practice in Toronto, but held priestly positions in a number of locations in Canada and the United States. She retired in June 2014 from her position as rector at the church of St. John the Evangelist, Thunder Bay, Ontario.
The issue of female ordination in the Anglican church of the 70’s was hugely contentious. At the ordination ceremony of Rev. Mary and two other ordinands, one woman and one man, no photography was allowed, for fear it might trigger an unwanted incident. Bishop Bothwell had held a press conference earlier in the afternoon at which he had to take a firm hold on the proceedings to prevent trouble, and two plain-clothes police officers were on duty at the back of the church in case of protests or violence. That is how volatile the situation was deemed to be. In Vancouver, the first ordination of a woman was in fact disrupted by a protester. Fortunately in Niagara, Rev. Mary’s ordination proceeded without incident.
It took years of questioning, study and debate in a very confrontational environment, but the Anglican Church in Canada was finally able to do the right thing and joyfully welcome women to the priesthood. The first woman to become a bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada was Victoria Matthews, who was ordained to the episcopate on 12 February 1994, eighteen years after the first female priests were ordained.
The Presbyterian experience, eight years earlier, was no less contentious. A study guide put out by the Presbyterian Church in Canada in the early sixties when it first began to consider the issue of female elders and ministers, was titled “Putting Woman in Her Place”. This deliberately provocative double entendre was not lost on those who read it. In 1961, the General Assembly passed a resolution to accept women as elders. Seven years later, on May 29, 1968, Reverend Shirley Jeffery, the first woman to graduate from Knox College, was ordained as the first female minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. (As a matter of interest, Rev. Lydia Emelie Gruchy became the first woman to be ordained in the United Church of Canada thirty-two years earlier, in 1936! This was incredibly visionary, happening only eleven years after Church Union, and long before the feminist movement was a flicker in Gloria Steinem’s brain.)
Many of you are old enough to remember the controversy surrounding this issue. As a convert from Catholicism, I deplore the Catholic Church’s refusal to alter its rule of a celibate male-only priesthood. I came to the reformed tradition not long after the question of women in the ministry was settled, but until I started researching this article, I had taken for granted the presence of women in Presbyterian pulpits. I was surprised to learn that the whole issue had been fraught with contention for more than ten years before it was finally decided. Rev. Cam Taylor, God rest his soul, who was a student at Knox College when this debate was going on, had this to say: “There was controversy of course, and I recall one senior minister of the conservative persuasion saying something like, ‘Well, we lost this one, but we won’t lose the next!’ Cam added, “I think for the most part, things settled down and there was acceptance on the part of most, though…some of the earlier ordained women faced criticism and difficult times.”
The cover story in the Presbyterian Record, January 2016, was devoted to stories of women in the ministry. From what these women had to say it is clear that, although we may have “come a long way, baby”, we aren’t done yet. Although it is rare these days, there are still people fond of quoting
1 Timothy 2, or 1 Corinthians 14 to back their opposition to female clergy.
I prefer to quote 3 Galatians 28 – “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.
Congratulations and praise to the Church of England for recognizing that we are all one in Jesus, and heartfelt prayers for Sarah Mullally’s success as Archbishop of Canterbury.