Episcopal Church installs new leader

WASHINGTON — Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori formally took office Saturday as the first woman to lead The Episcopal Church and promised to seek healing and wholeness in a denomination threatened by schism.

Jefferts Schori, 52, a pilot, rock climber and former oceanographer whose surprise election in June deepened existing rifts over homosexuality and the authority of Scripture, did not delve into those issues in her opening sermon as presiding bishop.

But she did call for peace, intoning the Hebrew word "shalom" no less than seven times.

"If some in this church feel wounded by recent decisions, then our salvation, our health as a body, is at some hazard, and it becomes the duty of all of us to seek healing and wholeness," she said.

More than 3,000 people, including 150 bishops in crimson robes, packed the National Cathedral for the investiture ceremony, a symbolic blend of tradition and modernity.

In the culminating rite of transition, her predecessor, Bishop Frank Griswold III, handed her a gold and silver staff.

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, sent an emissary to offer his "prayers and best wishes" for her nine-year term. "She will take on this responsibility in the most challenging times," he said.

The 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of the 77-million-member Anglican Communion. Thirteen of the 38 churches in the communion have no female priests, much less bishops, and Jefferts Schori is the first woman to head any national church in the nearly 500-year history of Anglicanism.

Williams has accepted her election. He met privately with her in London on Oct. 27 and invited her to the next gathering of the communion's 38 presiding bishops, or primates, February in Tanzania.

But several primates in developing countries where Anglicanism is fast-growing and deeply traditional have said they will have difficulty sitting down with her, not so much because of her gender as because of her views on homosexuality and theology.

Jefferts Schori voted in 2003 to confirm the election of New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Anglican prelate. She has supported blessings for same-sex couples, and she has said that although she believes in salvation through Jesus, she does not think Christianity is the only path to God.

She is married to a theoretical mathematician, and they have a 25-year-old daughter.

Those positions fall on one side of an increasingly bitter fault line in the U.S. church. Seven of the 111 Episcopal dioceses have rejected her authority, though they have stopped short of formally breaking from the denomination. Some individual parishes have cut all ties to the Episcopal Church.

Jefferts Schori, elected June 18 by delegates to the General Convention, has said she does not intend either to disguise her views or to push them on others.

The message of Jesus can be fulfilled, she said in Saturday's sermon, through "the will to make peace with one who disdains our theological position — for his has merit, too, as the fruit of faithfulness."