The Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, ninth Bishop of Nevada, began a new life on Sunday, June 18 — a life in which her face, and her name, are suddenly familiar to people across the Church, the nation, and yes, the world. The first woman to be nominated for the office of Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church was elected on the fifth ballot to be the 26th Presiding Bishop-elect. She will be instituted as Presiding Bishop and Primate on Nov. 4 at Washington National Cathedral.
Being open to the call of new life has marked the path for the 52-yearold. As an active lay leader in the Diocese of Oregon, she balanced her work as a PhD oceanographer with serving as Dean of the Diocesan School of Theology. The call to priesthood was not without struggle of discernment, but it was a call she embraced, as was the call to serve as Bishop of Nevada. And now, the call to another new life — this time as the Chief Pastor of the Episcopal Church.
Accompanying Bishop Jefferts Schori to the convention was her husband of 27 years, Richard Schori, a retired theoretical mathematician, and avid outdoorsman. Joining them for family photos after the election was their daughter Katharine (Kate) Johanna Harris, (24), a second lieutenant and pilot in the U.S. Air Force, and her husband, Aaron Harris.
Immediately following the election, Bishop Jefferts Schori reached her husband by phone, and said to him, “I’ve been elected, and I’m so glad you’re an adventurer,” Richard “Dick” Schori told The Convention Daily reporter Carol E. Barnwell, as he, along with his wife, met the media. Schori had actually been quiet presence in the working newsroom of Convention in his capacity as Web master for the Diocese of Nevada. Now, however, he is on the other side of media interest.
The couple met 28 years ago at a stewardship dinner when Schori was chair of the mathematics department at Oregon State University and Katharine Jefferts was a graduate student in oceanography. The Daily quoted Schori: “I saw a depth in her,” he said. “We have a similar amount of adventurous spirit…She’s fearless.”
Convention-goers began hearing something of that adventurous spirit in the Presiding Bishop-elect’s press conferences, remarks — and her sermon at the closing Eucharist, when she began by relating experiences from her just-past-dawn run that morning in downtown Columbus. The couple are back-packers and campers. In the spring of 2006, they took a refresher course in Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where they have traveled and studied over a period of years. Bishop Jefferts Schori is fluent in Spanish, easily moving from English to Spanish as she speaks. Richard Schori, a former collegiate and Olympic-style wrestler as well as a high-level mountain climber, has made a solo, un-roped ascent of the Matterhorn, climbed the Dolomites in Italy, and Mt. McKinley (20,320 feet.)Bishop Jefferts Schori is an active, instrument-rated pilot with more than 500 hours logged. She grew up in an environment where flying was a fact of life. Her father was a navy fighter pilot, and flying the family cross-country “from New Jersey to Seattle and back again” was standard procedure. She began flying lessons while in college; her father said if she passed the written exam, he would pay for her flying lessons. She was licensed in 1972, but found it an “expensive hobby.” After becoming Bishop of the “great geographic region of Nevada, I had a reason to use flying in my work.”
Bishop Jefferts Schori is a scientist, who received her B.S. degree in biology from Stanford in 1974; an M.S. in oceanography from Oregon State University in 1977, a PhD from Oregon State University in 1983; a Master’s of Divinity from Church Divinity School of the Pacific in 1994, and a Doctor of Divinity from CDSP in 2001. She was born March 26, 1954, in Pensacola, Fla. Prior to ordination, she was a visiting assistant professor at Oregon State University’s Department of Religious Studies, a visiting scientist at Oregon State University’s Department of Oceanography and an oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle. Her field is concerned with “things that live in the mud,” she said in her first press conference, adding that a more official title would be “Systematics and zone geography.” Her training as a scientist, she says, has given her practice in “looking at the world carefully; not assuming that I know everything about it,” and in “delighting in the incredible diversity of creation — the strange and wondrous way that we are made.” The New York Times stated that Bishop Jefferts Schori’s family seems defined by “staggering competence.” Her father was an astrophysicist who helped invent a system to tag and code salmon. Her mother has a degree in comparative literature, and later became a microbiologist.
She was raised as a Roman Catholic until she was nine years old, attending Convent School through fifth grade, when her parents joined the Episcopal Church. She values her Roman Catholic roots, but considers herself “deeply rooted in the Episcopal Church, where I learned to rejoice in God’s creation and value the life of the mind.” It was in the move from a “large and impersonal” church to a “small, intimate church” that she gained a “vision of what intimate community has the opportunity to be.”
Members of her parish in Corvallis, Oregon, encouraged her to consider ordination. A few years later, she was asked to preach, and shortly thereafter, began the process of discernment for the priesthood. She was ordained a priest in 1994. At the time of her election as Bishop of Nevada, she was assistant rector at the Church of the Good Samaritan in Corvallis, Oregon, where she also served as pastoral associate, dean of the Good Samaritan School of Theology, and priest-in-charge, El Buen Samaritano, Corvallis. She was consecrated Bishop in 2001.
Her service to the wider church includes current membership on the Special Commission on the Episcopal Church and The Anglican Communion; the Board of Trustees of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, the CREDO advisory board, the House of Bishops peer coaching program, the General Board of Examining Chaplains, the Board for Church Deployment; the House of Bishops’ Pastoral Development, Racism and Planning Committees; the Court for Review of the Trial of a Bishop; the Episcopal visitor team for the Community of the Holy Spirit and the Bishops of Small Dioceses group. In 2001-2003 she was a member of the 20/20 Strategy Group, and served as secretary of the House of Bishops Ministry Committee at the 2003 Convention. She has many published articles and sermons, including “When Conflict and Hope Abound” (Vestry Papers, March-April 2005).
On the Diocese of Nevada Web Convention Journal, Richard Schori notes briefly that following the election, their family was moved into a suite reserved for the new Presiding Bishop elect, and furnished with a driver. It was difficult to move around, he observed, as so many people wanted to speak with Bishop Katharine, as the Archbishop of Canterbury called her in his first communication after the election. Security service was also provided. However, it was not uncommon to see the Presiding Bishop-elect moving through the convention corridors by herself, just as she did before the afternoon of June 18.
Her first press conference before national and international media was notable for respectful engagement, even with those whose questions were hostile; quick but thoughtful, articulate response. Her first sermon as Presiding Bishop-elect was given on Wednesday morning, at the Convention’s closing Eucharist. (See link??????????) She urged the convention to “lay down our fear and love the world. Lay down our sword and shield and seek out the image of God’s beloved in the people we find it hardest to love. Lay down our narrow self interest and heal the hurting, fill the hungry and set the prisoners free. Lay down our need for power and control and bow to the image of God’s beloved in the weakest, the poorest, and the most excluded.” “We children can continue to squabble of the inheritance,” she concluded. “Or we can claim our name and heritage as God’s beloveds and share that name – beloved – with the whole world.” And her first appearance as the leader she will be came as she spoke briefly to the House of Deputies during their debate on Windsor Resolution B033. There are those who declare her election another stumbling block in relations with the Anglican Communion. And there are those bishops who claim that the Holy Spirit was at work on June 18. One national reporter, apparently impatient with those claims, challenged the Briefing Officers from the House of Bishops: “I’m tired of this Holy Spirit stuff. Tell me why a priest from a small diocese, only five years a Bishop, was elected?”
Bishop Chilton Knudsen, Diocese of Maine, replied: “I can’t speak for anyone but myself. But I can tell you what I believe.”
She referenced a move “beyond concern with traditional career trajectories to a discernment of giftedness,” and named gifts which she believes Katharine Jefferts Schori brings to the office:
• Being bi-lingual in a Church that is more and more bi-lingual and multicultural.
• She is well known in the House of Bishops for her leadership, her work in reconciliation and compromise (in that house); in working to help us stay together as a House.
• Her work in “a small diocese with few resources was creative, dynamic, bold and faithful to the Gospel.”
• She demonstrates “centeredness, groundedness and courage.”
• She has “great intelligence, the capacity to articulate our message, and to speak pastorally to everyone on every side.”
“It is clear that she has ‘great faith’ and is a ‘holy woman.’”
In a June 28 interview with NPR’s Diane Rehm, Bishop Jefferts Schori was asked how her episcopate, the first of a female Chief Pastor, might differ from that of the 25th Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold. She was quick to respond that she believed differences would not be of gender, or of a central doctrinal nature. Rather, one of “different generation and life experience,” which might result in a different style. The 25th Presiding Bishop, she stated, has been “remarkably effective through troubling times,” keeping the Church “clear and focused on reconciliation, the fundamental work of the Church.” This has been an “enormous gift,” she has said repeatedly, adding that he has “many more gifts to give us all.”
As for the new “first couple”— will they find ‘home’ in the concrete canyons of New York City, after the Nevada desert? They are still “sorting it out,” she says. “The present Presiding Bishop travels 70 percent of the time,” so home will take on a different meaning. The Presiding Bishop’s quarters at 815 Second Avenue, NYC, will be theirs to “occupy some of the time,” and they “may keep a house in Nevada.”
It’s all part of the new life, and, the Church’s “new song,” an image she referenced in speaking to the House of Bishops in March. The House of Bishops and the General Convention, she said, are not unlike the Humpback Whales who swim in the Pacific Ocean each year. They sing songs as they come together, sharing a common tune. Then they return to the places from which they came, where they teach the songs in their own locales. The song changes again; and when they come back together and blend their songs, there is yet another song that they learn together. For her, it is an image of what the Church is in its legislative sessions.
New life; a new song — for Presiding Bishop-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori, her family and her larger family in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.
Resources for this story include: Press Conference with Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, June 18, 2006, Columbus, Ohio; with additional quotes from The Convention Daily; The New York Times; transcript of National Public Radio interview with Diane Rehm and the official biographies of nominees for Presiding Bishop.
