Word: wendt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Episcopal Church, which limits its priesthood to men. In the latest confrontation, an Ohio church court found Oberlin's Rev. L. Peter Beebe guilty of breaking canon law by letting women with disputed ordinations celebrate Communion. As in the similar case of Washington, D.C.'s William Wendt (TIME, June 16), the court recommended that the bishop merely admonish Beebe, but it also proposed that he be suspended if he did it again. In effect the five judges backed Beebe by calling the Episcopal ban on women priests "outrageously inequitable and humiliating," and with a bizarre flourish they said...
Just two days after the ruling, Beebe again invited two women, Alison Cheek and Carter Heyward, to celebrate Communion, and told TIME he will continue to do so no matter what church officials decide. In Washington, Wendt's church announced that Cheek will join its staff and preside at Communion on July 27, even though the bishop there does not recognize her ordination...
After eleven women were ordained as the first female priests in the Episcopal church in a much disputed irregular service last summer, the church's House of Bishops declared the ordinations invalid. To the Rev. William Wendt, the ardently progressive rector of the Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington, D.C., the bishops' ruling was an inescapable challenge. He permitted one of the women, Alison Cheek, to celebrate the Eucharist in his parish. Soon, 18 priests in the diocese brought charges of disobedience against Wendt, setting the stage for a rare ecclesiastical trial (TIME...
Last week a five-member panel of priests and laymen voted 3 to 2 to find Wendt guilty. The three priests in the majority (the two dissenters were the laymen) urged Washington Bishop William Creighton to "admonish" Wendt and forbid him to permit "any person whose ordination is not in conformity with the canons of the church"-like one of the women priests, for instance-to function as a minister in his parish. At a press conference, Wendt called his sentence "a real slap on the wrist" and said that he would appeal the conviction or seek a new trial...
...five judges will now have to decide whether Wendt is guilty. If convicted, he could face ouster from the ministry. His fate is in the hands of Bishop Creighton, who is more likely to issue a reprimand at most, since he did not favor the firing of charges in the first place. Actually, Creighton is so sympathetic to the women's cause that he is practicing discrimination in reverse. Last month he announced that he would henceforth refuse to ordain all males in his diocese until the Episcopal Church opened the priesthood to women...