It is 10 years since the Church of Ireland General Synod decided to admit women to the priesthood. A special service in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, on September 3rd will mark the occasion, at which Archbishop Robin Eames will preach and the celebrant will be Canon Ginnie Kennerley, the first woman ordained to the priesthood in the Dublin Diocese.
Ordained women and those in training for ordination are holding a conference in the C of I Theological College, "Celebrating 10 years of women priests", the following Monday and Tuesday.
The Church of Ireland bishops have given their "wholehearted support" to both events, according to one of the organisers, the Rev Anne Taylor of Rathfarnham. According to figures she compiled there are 59 women C of I clergy - 31 full-time and 28 in the "worker priest" or self-supporting ministry.
They amount to 10 per cent of the total clergy in the Church of Ireland (577), and the proportion of women in the ministry is steadily increasing. Five of the 15 new deacons ordained this year are women, and 27 women are in training for ordination, 14 for full-time, parish ministry and 13 for self-supporting ministry.
The Rev Florence Tim Oi Li was the first Anglican woman ordained to the priesthood, in 1944. But after her ordination Bishop Ronald Hall of Hong Kong was told to resign unless she gave up exercising her priesthood. Not until 1971 did the Anglican Consultative Council declare it acceptable for a bishop to ordain a woman with the consent of the national church, and the Rev Joyce Bennet and the Rev Jane Huang were ordained priests by Bishop Gilbert Baker of Hong Kong that year.
There was little public controversy until the ordination of 11 women aged 27 to 79 in Philadelphia in 1974, in contravention of the canon law of the Anglican or Episcopal Church.
But the bishops involved were beyond censure, and when four more women were irregularly ordained in Washington in 1975, it was becoming obvious that women priests were going to be accepted throughout the Anglican Communion.
The US ordinations were regularised in 1976. In that year the Church of Ireland General Synod passed a resolution - proposed by Archbishop Buchanan of Dublin and seconded by Bishop Moore of Kilmore - approving the ordination of women in principle, subject to the necessary legislation.
A resolution to make provision for women in the priesthood failed by a narrow majority in 1980, but in 1984 the synod approved women becoming deacons. At a conference in Trinity College Dublin in 1986 Bishop Samuel Poyntz said he hoped he would be the first C of I bishop to ordain a woman to the priesthood.
Things were moving more quickly in the US. The first woman to become an Anglican bishop, the Right Rev Barbara Harris, was consecrated by over 50 bishops in Boston in 1989. A special guest was the Rev Florence Tim Oi Li, who said: "Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the church caught up with the times and entered into a new era."
BY 1990 women were being ordained to the priesthood in seven Anglican churches. In the Church of Ireland the final vote came in May 1990, after a good-natured synod debate and with the overwhelming two-thirds majorities needed from both laity and clergy for women priests and bishops.
Archbishop Eames, who had ensured the debate was conducted in a prayerful and dignified way, described the decision as "a step into the unknown".
There were no splits or walk-outs, and the most vocal critics were gracious and polite in accepting the mind of the church. Today two of those leading critics are deans of city cathedrals, and have been warmly welcoming to ordaining women in their cathedrals, or women becoming cathedral canons.
The first women priests in the Church of Ireland, the Rev Kathleen Young (now the Rev Kathleen Brown) and the late Rev Irene Templeton, were ordained in St Anne's Cathedral, Belfast. In the Republic the Rev Janet Catterall was ordained a priest by Bishop Roy Warke of Cork.
So far only two Anglican churches, in the US and New Zealand, have elected women bishops. The Church of England has been slower to take this step. Its General Synod at York last month agreed to explore the idea of women bishops, but without any time-scale commitment.
In the Church of Ireland the debate was less fractious than in England, where opponents have demanded conscience clauses or severance payments when they resigned.
The vast numbers of men predicted to leave to become priests in the Roman Catholic Church have not materialised, and some of those who left eventually returned to the Church of England. But the bad handling of the debates, resulting in the introduction of alternative episcopal oversight in the form of "flying bishops", has blurred diocesan boundaries and sown confusion about the bishop's role as the focus of unity and the pastor of pastors, and has undermined the authority of many bishops.
Given those pastoral nightmares and administrative disasters, it may be at least a decade before a woman becomes a bishop in the Church of England. With vacancies likely to arise in a number of Irish dioceses over the next five years and a new round of episcopal elections, it may not be long before we see a woman consecrated as a C of I bishop.
It may once again be a case of the C of I doing the right thing long before the C of E takes the first cautious steps.
Further information about the special celebration and conference events may be had from the organisers: the Rev Anne Taylor (anneted@gofree.indigo.ie) and the Rev Susan Green (greenorr@esatclear.ie).
The Rev Patrick Comerford is an Irish Times journalist and was ordained in the Church of Ireland this summer Contact: theology@ireland.com