Schori, Katharine Jefferts

Katharine Jefferts Schori is the head of the Episcopal Church in the United States (ECUSA). At her 2006 installation as presiding bishop, she became the first woman to lead any branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the first woman in the United States to lead a major Protestant denomination. Her short term of service in the church prior to her election, her gender, and her support of the ordination of gay clergy and same-sex marriage increased fears of a rift both within the ECUSA and between that body and the 77 million worldwide Anglican Communion. Schori has not wavered in her progressive allegiances, even in the face of conservative groups such as the diocese of Pittsburg leaving the ECUSA.

Born Katharine Jefferts in Pensacola, Florida, on March 26, 1954, Schori was the first of four children. The Jefferts were Catholic, and Katharine attended parochial school until she was in the fifth grade, when the family moved to New Jersey, where they converted to Episcopalian and enrolled their children in public schools. Schori's father was a Navy pilot and a physicist, her mother a microbiologist and virologist, and Schori decided from an early age that she would be a scientist. She received a B.S. from Stanford University, where she majored in biology, and in 1974, she entered Oregon State University in Corvallis, where she received a master's degree (1977) and a Ph.D. (1983), both in oceanography. By the time she completed graduate work, she was married to Richard Miles Schori, a mathematician, and the mother of one daughter. She worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service, but she began considering the priesthood in the mid-80s. It was not until 1991 that she entered the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, in Berkeley, California. Three years later, at age 40, she completed a Master of Divinity degree and was ordained as both a deacon and a priest in the Episcopal Church.

Schori served as assistant rector at her church, the Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan in Corvallis, Oregon, where her fluency in Spanish aided her pastoral work with congregants who were native speakers of Spanish. In 2001, she was elected bishop of the diocese of Nevada, the ninth woman to serve as bishop in the ECUSA. She used her skills as a licensed pilot to travel within Nevada, working to establish close ties to minority church members. In 2003, she supported the controversial consecration of the openly gay V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. At the 2006 General Convention of the ECUSA, Schori was the lone female among the seven candidates for the next presiding bishop. On November 4, 2006, she became the 26th person and first woman to head the ECUSA. At the Lambeth Conference in July 2008, a gathering of the worldwide Anglican Communion from which many had demanded Schori be excluded, she compared the [Page 1281]battle over women bishops and homosexual clergy to birth pangs and insisted that the changed Episcopal body will prevail over the threat of schism.

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