The Rev Canon Mary Michael Simpson, OSH died Wednesday in Augusta GA. She was one of the first women ordained in the Episcopal Church and was the first woman to preach at Westminster Abbey.
“Canon Simpson addressed the issue [of women’s ordination] 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.”
[…]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.”
More here.
We Episcopalians give thanks for her life of service and witness in this church and within the wider Anglican Communion. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
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Amen!
Canon Mary, pray for us…
JC Fisher
I remember Canon Simpson with warmth and respect. Sister Mary Michael was novicemistress at the OSH house at Newburgh, New York, when I was a novice at OHC at West Park, and the two novitiates shared a number of educational and service activities. This was a number of years before the ordination of women to the priesthood became a reality, but the intelligence and wisdom of Mary Michael and her OSH sisters helped me accept and rejoice in women’s ordination in subsequent years. (Bishop Ann Tottenham was also in that novitiate group.) May Mary Michael indeed rest in peace and rise in glory.