The First Woman Is Ordained an Anglican Priest

In 1943 the deaconess Florence Li Tim Oi was in charge of an Anglican congregation in Macau, and the war kept her bishop, Ronald Hall of Hong Kong, from reaching her. In June of that year Hall wrote to William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, that he had given her permission to celebrate the Lord’s Supper for a congregation of 150 and would ordain her priest if he could reach her. He added that he was no advocate of the ordination of women, but would not let prejudice keep the sacraments from his people (Li and Harrison, Much Beloved Daughter ch. 4, pp. 41–42 (Hall to Temple, 4 June 1943)).

In January 1944 she crossed Japanese-held territory to meet him at Xingxing, in unoccupied China. From there, by her own later account, they went the short distance to Zhaoqing, where he ordained her in a small Anglican church; she speaks of herself there as the first woman to become a priest (Li and Harrison, Much Beloved Daughter ch. 4, pp. 43–45). Two days later Hall told Temple that he had ordained a Chinese deaconess “a priest in the Church of God”. He had acted, he wrote, outside the canons of the Chinese church, which made no such provision; he did not expect her orders to be recognised for the present, and he would report to the General Synod after the war (Li and Harrison, Much Beloved Daughter ch. 4, p. 48 (Hall to Temple, 27 January 1944)).

The Chinese House of Bishops, meeting at Shanghai in March 1946, voted its regret at Hall’s “uncanonical action” and asked him to accept the resignation from her priestly ministry which, it understood, she had already placed in his hands (Li and Harrison, Much Beloved Daughter pp. 58–59 (resolution of the House of Bishops, March 1946)). In April 1948 an Anglican group in England cited the ordination in a memorial to the Lambeth Conference (Anglican Group for the Ordination of Women, Memorial to the Lambeth Conference (1948) II (2), Appeal from China). The Lambeth Conference of that year had before it a proposal from the diocese of South China that for twenty years a deaconess might be ordained priest as an experiment. It answered that this would be against Anglican tradition and order (Lambeth Conference 1948, Resolution 113), reaffirmed that the order of deaconess was the one order of ministry it could recommend for women (Lambeth Conference 1948, Resolution 114), and judged that the time had not come to reconsider the matter (Lambeth Conference 1948, Resolution 115).

Twenty years later the bishops called the theological arguments for and against inconclusive (Lambeth Conference 1968, Resolution 34) and asked every province to study the question (Lambeth Conference 1968, Resolution 35). In 1978 they noted that Hong Kong, Canada, the United States and New Zealand had admitted women to the presbyterate, recognised the right of each member church to decide, and declared their acceptance both of churches that ordain women and of churches that do not (Lambeth Conference 1978, Resolution 21.1, 21.3, 21.6).

John Paul II declared in 1994 that the Church has “no authority whatsoever” to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be held definitively (John Paul II, Ordinatio sacerdotalis 4). The Orthodox members of the joint commission with the Anglicans stated in 1978 that women cannot be admitted to the priesthood and that their ordination is an innovation without basis in Holy Tradition (Anglican-Orthodox Dublin Agreed Statement (1984), Appendix 2, Athens Report 1978, III (3)).