The Rev. Christine Day at her Syracuse home, with an icon she created that honors the late Rev. Betty Bone Schiess. Credit: Michael Greenlar | Central Current

Bishop Jennifer Lynn Baskerville-Burrows traveled 650 miles to give this sermon. She presides over the Episcopal diocese of Indianapolis, and she hasn’t walked through the doors of Grace Episcopal Church on Madison Street in Syracuse since Baskerville-Burrows served as a beloved rector there, from 2004 until 2012.

She’s returning because she sees this request as a deep honor, and out of gratitude at how the woman she intends to honor tonight affected the entire arc of thousands of lives.

That certainly includes Baskerville-Burrows, who will speak during a 7 p.m. Episcopal service — open to the public — that will emphasize the impact and legacy of the late Rev. Betty Bone Schiess, a barrier-breaking giant in the history of the Episcopal Church.

“She was this icon, this wisdom person,” Baskerville-Burrows said.

It’s exactly 50 years ago today that Bone Schiess — an inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls — celebrated the Eucharist in public for the first time from the altar of Grace Episcopal, which means she consecrated the bread and wine and shared it with the congregation.

Bone Schiess died in 2017. In “Why Me, Lord?,” her memoir and account of her journey to ordination, Bone Schiess — observing her weariness at stubborn opposition to women priests from her own church hierarchy — described the event as “not much more than a Pyrrhic victory, if that.” Her many friends and admirers disagree, as they’ll prove with their celebration tonight.

A Jim Caiella image of Rev. Betty Bone Schiess participating in the Episcopal Eucharist at Grace Episcopal Church, July 29, 1975, courtesy of Caiella and Susan Keeter.

Her central role in that 1975 Eucharist, in Syracuse — which historians see as symbolically monumental for both her church and the history of women’s rights — was a year to the day after Bone Schiess became one of the “Philadelphia 11,” a group of women serving as deacons who were ordained in Philadelphia as Episcopal priests, in defiance of church leadership.

Thousands of women now serve as bishops or priests in the Episcopal Church. But the impact at the time was seismic. The Episcopal priesthood was all-male. Church leaders declared the ordination of Bone Schiess and her 10 fellow women priests to be “irregular.”

It would take two years — and the pursuit of state and federal human rights complaints by Bone Schiess — to push the Episcopal church into finally accepting the ordination of women. Once it happened, it shattered “the stained glass ceiling” for women priests that still exists in the Catholic Church and some other denominations, said Rev. Christine Day, a longtime Episcopal priest in Johnson City who’s now retired, in Syracuse.

Today, women leading worship services in the Episcopal Church might seem like an everyday thing.

Yet no one taking part this evening forgets how unimaginable that was, even a half-century ago.

Bone Schiess – who later served as a chaplain at Syracuse University and Cornell, and as a rector in Mexico, N.Y. – “had a huge impact,” said Bishop DeDe Duncan-Probe of the Episcopal Diocese of Syracuse, who will preside at tonight’s service. Within Duncan-Probe’s own memories “of trying to figure out what to do with my life,” she recalls how “the path to ordination was not open to me” — at least not until the Philadelphia 11 took their vows, setting in motion great changes within their church.

To lead tonight’s service, in the presence of Bone Schiess’ children and so many others lifted up by her courage, involves a sense of what Duncan-Probe described as “privilege and responsibility and honor.”

The Rt. Rev. Dr. DeDe Duncan-Probe, Episcopal bishop of Central New York. Courtesy Episcopal Diocese of Central New York.

The gathering was organized by a group of parishioners that includes Susan Keeter, praised by Baskerville-Burrows “as the heart and soul of remembering the story” at Grace. Keeter, in the process of putting the event together, had a particularly powerful moment: While seeking the memories of anyone who was there in 1975, she posted a photograph on Facebook of Bone Schiess distributing Communion that had appeared in a Time Magazine article, at the time.

She promptly received a private message on Facebook from Jim Caiella, who lives in Virginia. Fifty years ago, as a photographer for the UPI wire service, he captured that image. He asked Keeter if she would add his photo credit to the post, and his note led to a bond — and an emotional exchange.

Caiella, a Henninger High School graduate, explained to Keeter that he is dying of cancer. Since childhood, as he told me afterward in a conversation, he had been fascinated by photography. He took it up in earnest after he served in the Army. Caiella and his wife Cinda settled in Syracuse, where Caiella attended Syracuse University.

He was “stringing” for UPI in 1975 when he received the call to cover Bone Schiess distributing the Eucharist, at Grace.

Raised a Catholic and accustomed to seeing only men as priests, “I appreciated the significance of the event,” Caiella said — noting how it’s difficult today to recall the extraordinary power of photographing a woman in priest’s robes on the altar, 50 years ago. He tried to be as unobtrusive as possible at the service, though he said of Bone Schiess: “My focus was her. Wherever she was is where I tried to be.”

In recent months, Caiella and Keeter struck up a friendship. While Caiella’s health will not allow him to be there for the service, he went into his files and shared his images from that 1975 service with Keeter, who will display them at the church tonight — and already sent those photos to be archived at the Women’s Hall of Fame.

A Time Magazine excerpt, with Jim Caiella image, of Betty Bone Schiess celebrating the Eucharist publicly for the first time, at Grace Episcopal Church. Credit: Image courtesy Susan Keeter

“I’m a firm believer things happen because they’re meant to happen,” said Caiella, who suspects sharing those photos represents the final photography project of his life.

Several of his images from 50 years ago include the then-soon-to-be Rev. Beverly Messenger-Harris, who recalled how she traveled to the Philadelphia ordination to support both Merrill Bittner, a good friend, and “Betty, whom I had also come to know and love.”

In 1977, The New York Times reported on how Messenger-Harris became the first woman named an Episcopal rector, at the Gethsemane Episcopal Church in Sherrill. Two years earlier, she was still an Episcopal deacon when Bone Schiess asked her to take part in the service at Grace.

“So there we were in that packed, hot church,” Messenger-Harris wrote in an email this week, “Betty and I standing side-by-side at the central altar looking at the silver chalices, patens, cruets, wafers, wine, linens.

“Betty quietly says to me: ‘Do you know how to do this?’

“Me: ‘Well, we’ve been watching men do it for years.’

“Betty: ‘Well, it can’t be that hard.’”

“So we were off and celebrating, confident that all we were doing was being guided by the Divine Hands that had brought us to that moment.”

The Eucharist, Messenger-Harris said, “was glorious.” Of their historic roles within the church, she wrote:

“Betty was the plow. I was the seed.”

Tonight’s ceremonies will also include the blessing of an icon — a piece of art on a heavy wooden board that in this case portrays Bone Schiess celebrating the Eucharist — created by Christine Day, the retired Episcopal priest who served for two years as an interim priest at Grace, where the icon will hang in the sanctuary.

Bishop Jennifer Lynn Baskerville-Burrows, Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis, which provided this image.

What Bone Schiess and her 10 contemporaries accomplished in Philadelphia was “earth shattering” for women and for the Episcopal Church as a whole, Day said. Raised a Lutheran, she remembers dreaming about the ministry as a child, when all paths seemed closed to that destination.

It was only after she returned to Cornell following the death of her husband — musician and composer Brian Israel — that she found herself drawn to the Episcopal Church, and eventually toward ordination.

A role that had seemed “unimaginable” as a child became her lifetime work. The point Day makes with the image of Bone Schiess on the icon is a statement of admiration and belief: Bone Schiess, Day emphasized again, “was called to break that stained glass ceiling.”

As for Baskerville-Burrows, she said she is hoping to offer a sermon that will not only praise what Bone Schiess accomplished, but will ask what she might say of her church and her nation, if she were here. In her memoir, Bone Schiess both remembered the whole difficult path to ordination and warned all of us against complacency.

Her mission, at all times, was compassion and justice. She was drawn to Grace originally by its diversity, by its commitment to inclusion. She was a tireless advocate for equality for all people, a champion of the civil rights and peace movements during the Vietnam era, and her book — until its final paragraphs — prods the Episcopal Church to live up to the highest Christian ideals.

Of her sermon, Baskerville-Burrows said on Monday, “I’m still writing it.” She feels a responsibility to make a point at the pulpit that transcends legacy: Her mission is not only to honor the landscape-changing work of a fierce groundbreaker, but to remind all of us of how Bone Schiess — in a struggling world, then or now — would find little room to rest.   

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...