50 Years of Women’s Ordination: The Rev. Canon Jan Naylor Cope

Provost Jan Naylor Cope recognizes the significance of the 50th anniversary of women's ordination in The Episcopal Church, but still longs for the day when a female priest is just a priest, or a female bishop is just a bishop.

“We’re close, but we’re not quite there yet,” said Jan, who was ordained a priest here at the Cathedral in 2008.

• READ MORE: Celebrating 50 Years of Women’s Ordination

Growing up in small town South Texas, she said she was never limited by her gender — “it was really all hands on deck, including when they recruited me to be the organist because I was free.” Nonetheless, all the clergy she met were “Father Somebody,” and it wasn’t until she was well into adulthood that she encountered a female priest.

She was particularly struck by this photo, taken in 2011. There she is on the right, alongside Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori (the first female Anglican primate in the world) and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde (the first woman elected to lead the Episcopal Diocese of Washington). “We stand on the shoulders of so many.”

If she could go back and talk to some of those brave women who dared to seek ordination back in 1974, here’s what she would say:

“I’m just struck by how strong and compelling the sense of call had to have been. To be a trailblazer, knowing how difficult it would be. And having to be certain, that out of all the different ministry paths one could take, that that’s the one God had in mind for them.

I’d want to ask them: ‘Would you still do it?’ Because I think that would elicit a retelling of their call. You just don’t go into something like that to prove a point; it’s just too hard. And if you watch the documentary, it was just something they couldn’t say no to. 

This wasn’t about gender, or picking a fight. This was about answering a call.”