On a bright morning in Hermosa Beach, Calif., sunlight enters St. Cross Episcopal Church at a slant, catching a bit of church history in the colored panes of a stained-glass window.
For the Rev. Rachel Nyback, the church's rector, it is something closer to a record of quiet upheaval.
"What I love about this piece of stained glass is that you see the first woman who was called in the Diocese of Los Angeles to serve as a priest," said Nyback, "and she was hired here at St. Cross."
The figure in the glass is of Rev. Canon Victoria Hatch, who was ordained at a moment half a century ago when the presence of a woman at the altar or in a pulpit was an innovation — and an argument.
On Wednesday the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch, will witness another historic moment: the installation of Sarah Mullally as the first woman to lead the global association of churches that trace their roots to Henry VIII's 16th century break with the Catholic Church.
Mullally's selection as archbishop of Canterbury comes as a joy and a surprise for many female priests in the Episcopal Church. Fifty years is, as Nyback observes, both a long time in the life of a person and hardly any time at all in the life of the church.
"We've made it over this barrier," said Nyback, "but it doesn't mean equality has been achieved, and it's something that we have to keep working on."
The barrier she refers to is sometimes described, with a mixture of wryness and fatigue, as the stained-glass ceiling. It is not a prohibition so much as a pattern: permissions granted in theory, withheld in practice.
"OK, you can be a female priest, but there aren't jobs for you," said Nyback. "Or you can only be an associate. Or when you're ready to go get your own parish, we only have these small parishes over here that really are meant for you."
In this sense, Mullally's rise has been received not simply as a milestone but as a test. Her appointment follows the resignation of Justin Welby in 2024, amid criticism over his handling of sexual abuse cases, and arrives at a moment when the Communion itself is under strain. Some of its more conservative provinces, particularly in parts of Africa, have threatened to break away over issues that include the ordination of women and the inclusion of LGBTQ people.
Sisterhood is powerful among female clergy
The Rev. Norma Guerra, a priest in the Diocese of Los Angeles, recalls her initial skepticism when Mullally's name first circulated last year.
"Well, at first I was a little doubtful, you know, if this was going to really happen," she said in her office at the diocese's headquarters on a recent, rainy afternoon.
When an international consortium of Anglican Church leaders selected Mullally last October, Guerra's doubts gave way to joy.
"It's such an awakening and recognition of women's role in the church."
Guerra speaks of Mullally's background — more than two decades as a priest in the Church of England, most recently as bishop of London, and, before that, a career as an oncology nurse — as preparation for leadership in a divided institution.
"Leadership full of compassion and with a perspective of reconciling, of unity," she said.
The Church of England began ordaining women as priests in 1994, and didn't vote to allow them to become bishops until 2014.
Even as the church contemplates the future, its present remains marked by the persistence of its past. Guerra keeps, on her office wall, a photograph of herself with Carter Heyward, one of 11 women ordained in Philadelphia in 1974, in defiance of church law. Their ordinations were not officially recognized until two years later, when the Episcopal Church changed its policy to allow for women's ordination.
"So I figured it would take a while," said Heyward from her home in Tennessee. "The 11 of us who had been ordained would be really pariahs and would not ever really be seen as a sort of good priest by many Episcopalians. And that has been the case."
Heyward's expectation proved, if anything, understated at first but gave way to widespread acceptance over the last half century. In 2003, Gene Robinson was elected the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. In 2006, the church chose Katharine Jefferts Schori as its first female presiding bishop.
Heyward regards the decades since her ordination as transformative: "Expanding justice to those who have been excluded, making sure that people understand the life, the work and a constant, ongoing presence of Jesus as a risen Christ."
Today, women make up a little more than half of Episcopalians in the United States, though their presence thins as one ascends the hierarchy: roughly 40 percent of priests and about 30 percent of bishops. The imbalance, Heyward suggests, is itself a form of testimony to the resistance as well as the acceptance of women in clerical collars.
"You can be respectful and kind to the people who oppose you," she said. "But you do not need to permit them to stop you."
Women still face opposition, even at the highest levels of ministry
For the Right Rev. Paula Clark, resistance is neither abstract nor distant in her role as the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. Clark describes herself with a litany that doubles as a challenge to expectation: "I am the first woman. I'm the first Black woman. And I am also a person who's disabled or differently abled, the way I say it."
Shortly after her election, Clark suffered a brain bleed, an experience that has informed her sense of vocation as much as any theological training. She recalls an international gathering of Anglican bishops in the U.K. a few years ago, where the assumptions of gender were laid bare with disarming casualness.
"We were broken into small groups, and I was the only woman in the group," she said. "I was told that I should be with the rest of the wives."
The distance between such moments and the symbolic elevation of a woman to the Communion's highest office is not, perhaps, as great as it might seem. Even within her own diocese, Clark encounters parishes that resist her authority.
"Right now, there are parishes in the Diocese of Chicago where I am unwelcome because I'm a woman," she said. "I go anyway."
Go anyway: the phrase recurs, in different voices and settings, as a kind of unofficial creed.
'Those stories are also our stories'
At St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, the evidence of that persistence is arranged in glass and stone.
"If you look at the south side of the nave," said rector Nadia Stefko on a recent Tuesday morning, "all of the windows on the lower level here are all exclusively women saints of the church."
Stefko names them as she walks down her church's center aisle: St. Anne, Mary the mother of Jesus, Martha, Hilda, Margaret of Scotland, Elizabeth. The list is both historical and immediate, a reminder that what now appears as progress often begins as an anomaly.
Stefko finds it telling that the new archbishop of Canterbury is stepping into the role during a time of stress in the Anglican Communion, in part created by her predecessor who failed to report to police that a volunteer counselor at Christian summer camps had been accused of serial physical and sexual abuse. John Smyth, a prominent attorney, abused more than 100 boys and young men in the United Kingdom and Africa, according to a church report.
"It's an instance of men behaving badly," Stefko said, "and a woman being called in to clean up the mess."
Standing next to Stefko in the nave of the church is her colleague at St. Augustine's, the Rev. Shannon Page, one of the newest priests in the Diocese of Chicago. Page speaks of the tradition of women's leadership in the church not as inheritance alone but also as recognition of inherent gifts for ministry.
"Our tradition is full of these stories of women who had deep experiences of God," she said. "Those stories are also our stories."
Page's family sits in a pew here on Sunday mornings while she's busy up front at the altar or in the pulpit.
"I have a 2-year-old daughter, and now I'm just thinking that's kind of cool that she sits on this side, too," said Page. "I wonder if she's also looking at the women, seeing herself, her stories, in this space."
The question lingers, suspended between the figures in glass and the thought of a young child squirming below them. It is, in its way, the same question that attends Sarah Mullally's installation as the new archbishop of Canterbury: not simply what has changed, but what the future holds.
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