Deacon Katrina Swanson’s Call to the Episcopal Priesthood

Bishops and Priests run in her family, but will a woman ever become a priest?

WASHINGTON, April 22, 1973: Katrina van Alstyne Swanson is the wife of an Episcopal priest, the daughter of a bishop, the granddaughter of a priest and the great-granddaughter of a bishop.

So it was not surprising that in 1970 when the Episcopal Church decided to recognize women as deacons, Mrs. Swanson was one of the first to become ordained.

Mrs. Swanson, 38, who was in town recently for a conference with women seminarians at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va. said that the only person who was startled by her decision to become a deacon was her father, the Rt. Rev. Edward Randolph Welles, who ordained her.

“I called to make an appointment,” Mrs. Swanson recalls with some delight, “and he said, ‘Since when do you need an appointment to see your father?’”

When he learned the reason for the formality Bishop Welles was terribly pleased. The next day, driving to church, he burst out laughing. “I always thought it would be nice to have a son in the priesthood (he has two sons, both in secular occupations), but I never thought I’d have a daughter who was ordained.”

Neither did his daughter. “I’d always said that if I’d been a man, I would have been a priest. But of course I put it out of my mind.”

Now even this desire may be realized. At the last annual meeting of the House of Bishops, a straw vote was 74 to 61 in favor of ordaining women as priests, Mrs. Swanson said. But she believes minds may be changed before a binding vote might be made at the church’s general meeting this fall.

Mrs. Swanson’s father retired last year as bishop of West Missouri. She and her husband, Father George Swanson, rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Kansas City, Mo., have two boys, Olof, 11, and William, 9.

“The news that women could become deacons hit Katrina like bolt of lightning,” Father Swanson reports. “The surprising thing to me was that it was not really all that surprising. Katrina’s depth of loyalty to the church has always been so tremendous.”

If he had any pangs because of her decision, they were in sympathy. “The more ordained you get, the worse it hurts. I felt for her. There is an element of suffering in the ministry,” said Father Swanson, whose catholic approach to his ministry and his sensitivity to people of all races and economic levels has not always gone down well with his parishioners, either in Kansas City, Mo., or in Coalinga, Calif., where he had been a rector for eight years previously.

“Sometimes you are dealing with evil, with deep maliciousness in people; it doesn’t help to enlist in the front lines of the battle,” said Father Swanson who believes, “a person has to stand for something.”

Since his wife has been ordained, Father Swanson has found her “so much more understanding of what it’s all about. Now she’s being hit with things I was hit with 10 or 15 years ago. That really zapped me.”

Deacon Swanson’s experience started later than his, and it has drawn them closer. “There is a gap between clergy and laity. She was an outsider,” said Father Swanson who fully expects women to be able to become priests — if not this year, then shortly.

Mrs. Swanson, a Radcliffe graduate, attended Alexandria schools and the National Cathedral school when her father was rector of Christ Church, Alexandria from 1939 to 1944. Father Swanson, whom she married soon after college, is a Harvard graduate. She says that if she hadn’t married, she would have gone into social work. Instead, she became a housewife, a gourmet cook and a painter.

The Swansons have an asceticism which produces an offbeat lifestyle some find hard to understand. Mrs. Swanson’s trousseau had an abundance of linens and old family silver, which she uses for every day, partly because she considers paper napkins an extravagance. The boys sometimes wear hand-me-down clothes, and Mrs. Swanson’s clericals — a shirt and white collar — belong to her husband. “They’re a little big,” she said with a smile, “but what the heck, why waste money?”

But elegant food and trips to see friends come under the heading of necessities.

The experience of being a deacon has enlarged Mrs. Swanson’s conception of herself and her church. “As a clergy wife, I always felt it was his show. I was glad to help George in any way, but I was not the typical clergyman’s wife who ran half the church.”

Nor was she interested in becoming a deaconess, a calling theoretically identical to that of a deacon but in actuality more in the nature of religious social work. “A deaconess,” explained Mrs. Swanson, “was a woman, who felt God had some work for her to do, so she would do something like go off to China, like an Ingrid Berman sort of thing in the movies, and start a school or set up a mission and make hundreds of Christians out of nothing. And then after she got it really well organized, the church would see what a good thing she had going and send out a priest to take it over.”

With some exceptions, deacons have been men who become priests. They help priests with services, administer the chalice and distribute reserved sacrament — “the things the priest has already made holy” — to parishioners. “For a man, being a deacon is a step before the priesthood; for a woman, it is a calling in itself,” said Mrs. Swanson. With few exceptions, deacons received a stipend; with few exceptions, deaconesses did not.

Father Swanson makes the point that the 1970 decision “didn’t make women deacons,” it recognized that they had always been “within the diaconate.” In the 1880s, he said, the church voted to set apart women as deaconesses. This was a subtle distinction as contrasted to ordination and it did not last indefinitely. Gradually, deaconesses and deacons were ordained in an identical manner, even though the laity was unaware of this.

There were fewer than 60 deaconesses at the time of the ruling and many of them prefer to be called by the earlier term, Mrs. Swanson said. She is one of a dozen women, not previously deaconesses, ordained directly as a deacon.

As a deacon, she takes the reserved sacrament — “which is the body and blood of Jesus Christ” — to the sick and the shut-ins in her parish. “This is the leftover sacrament from the main service on Sunday that is saved up and locked in a holy place in the church,” she explained. “I take it out of that place and bring it to those who cannot get to church. This is something only an ordained person can do.”

She also helps her husband with the Sunday services but she cannot give the blessing. Father Swanson explains, “A blessing is to pronounce the presence of God upon the person or thing being blessed.”

Since becoming a deacon, Mrs. Swanson has observed this particular restriction scrupulously. “I no longer say God Bless you when you sneeze. I say gesundheit. I’m not supposed to bless people, so why kid around.”

A deacon cannot conduct a marriage ceremony because it requires a blessing, or hear confessions because she cannot absolve people of their sins in God’s name. But Mrs. Swanson can and does give holy unction. “When someone is sick or dying,” said Mrs. Swanson, “I can anoint them with the oil that’s been blessed by the bishop on Maundy Thursday.”

Her ordination has increased her spirituality, she said. “We feel there is something really holy in ordination, that there’s a real spirit, the Holy Spirit coming into you in a special way.”

During a year’s exchange of parishes, Father Swanson was in Botswana, Africa, where he traveled hundreds of miles in a Land Rover over nonexistent roads bringing the sacrament to some people who had not received it in as long as 11 years. In these villages, he and his wife found the women unofficially holding the religion together.

“That’s one reason I feel called,” said Mrs. Swanson. “There are a lot of Christian people around the world who do not have the sacraments available and we need more people to administer them. Of course, I’m not always in the right place at the right time, but if I am, I’ll be ready.”

[Editor’s Note: For more information on Katrina’s legacy visit Katrina’s Dream]

[This article originally appeared in The Washington Star-News, April 22, 1973 as A Deacon Now, She May Become a Priest. #37 in a collection of more than 100 newspaper articles by Judy Flander from the second wave of the Women’s Movement reflecting the fervor and ingenuity of the women who rode the wave.]