Barbara Harris

American religious leader

• Born: June 12, 1930
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: March 13, 2020
• Place of death: Lincoln, Massachusetts

A lifelong advocate for the full inclusion of women and people of color in church life and in society, Harris broke through nearly two millennia of religious tradition when she was consecrated a bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Early Life

Barbara Harris was born in 1930 to Walter Harris and Beatrice Price Harris, lifelong members of the Episcopal Church, in the Philadelphia suburb of Germantown. She was the middle of three children in the family. As a child of the Great Depression, she grew up in a home that emphasized the importance of both work and sharing. Her father supported the family through odd jobs and repair work. He also carefully tended the fruit trees growing in the family’s yard. During World War II he worked in a steel mill. Harris’s great-grandmother, who lived with the family when Harris was small, had been a slave, and she told many stories about the hardships of life under slavery. The children’s grandmother cleaned the local school, and sometimes she took young Harris along to help her.

Harris’s mother, Beatrice, was an active lay member of St. Barnabas Church, where the family worshiped. St. Barnabas was an all-black Episcopal parish. Located in the same city where Absalom Jones, the first African American to be ordained a priest, had founded his church, St. Barnabas carried on a proud tradition. The church was strongly oriented toward social justice and service, although it also preached values of the Christian gospel in living one’s daily life.

As a child and teenager Harris stayed active in church life. She organized a young adults group, which grew to more than fifty members, and regularly played the piano for church-school programs. She enjoyed her music lessons, practiced on an old Steinway piano, so much that she thought briefly of making a career of music.

However, Harris’s other interests were stronger. While a student at Philadelphia High School for Girls, she got an reporting assignment with the Pittsburgh Courier, writing a weekly column about school life. After she graduated in 1948, she enrolled at the Charles Morris Price School of Journalism, aiming for a career with the press.

Life’s Work

With the return of millions of former service members to colleges and their jobs after World War II and with the swing back to “normality” in American society, it was not the optimum time for a talented young black woman to start a journalistic career. Harris needed a job, and when she heard of an opening for a nurse’s aide at a local hospital, she applied and was accepted. Despite her resolve to work hard and do well at anything she tried, she hated the job. When she learned of an opening for a receptionist at a children’s hospital, she applied for the job and was hired.

Harris’s work at the children’s hospital led to a fortunate chance at a bigger job, when the father of one of her friends from high school offered her a job in his firm, Joseph V. Baker Associates. This was a black-owned public relations firm that promoted white-owned products and companies within black communities. The plan was for Harris to learn every aspect of the company’s work, from the ground up. She did this so well that within ten years she became the company’s president. In all, she was employed at Baker Associates for nineteen years, from 1949 to 1968. During this time she was married briefly, a marriage that ended in divorce. In 1968 she went to work for the Sun Oil Company, where she served as head of the community relations department.

Throughout this time period she continued to be active as an Episcopal laywoman. One of her major projects was the St. Dismas Society, which involved visiting prisons, leading services there, and befriending prisoners. In 1968 she transferred her membership from her home church of St. Barnabas to the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia. The latter church and its rector, Paul Washington, were in the vanguard of support for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, the campaign to empower the poor, and, soon, the push for equality for women within the Episcopal Church.

The cause for women’s equality within the Episcopal Church was to soon have its first victory within the church structure, and it was at Harris’s Church of the Advocate that this first victory took place. Three retired bishops ordained eleven women to the priesthood there in 1974. The ordination was technically valid at the time but irregular, because the church’s general convention had voted against allowing women to be priests in both 1970 and 1973. Nevertheless, a strong current was gathering in favor of women’s ordination. The ceremony at Philadelphia was carefully planned, with wide press coverage. Harris, who fully supported women’s ordination by this time, volunteered to carry the cross in the opening procession.

When the 1976 general convention authorized women’s ordination, Harris began to wonder if the priesthood might be her calling, too. With the diocese of Philadelphia’s approval, she entered an alternate course of study leading to the diaconate and then to the priesthood, taking courses at Villanova University and Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

After ordination as a deacon in 1979 and as a priest in 1980, Harris served in parish ministries on an interim basis. She was priest-in-charge at Norristown’s St. Augustine of Hippo Church from 1980 to 1984. However, her background in administration and social advocacy soon won her an appointment as executive director of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company and editor of The Witness, a progressive periodical focused on the need to confront social issues. Her hard-hitting articles and editorials there drew wide attention within the Episcopal Church, some of it admiring and some quite the opposite.

There were so many admirers of Harris by this time that when the diocese of Massachusetts needed a new suffragan (assistant) bishop, her name was placed in nomination. In the American Episcopal Church, bishops are chosen first by vote of clergy and lay representatives from the diocese and are then confirmed by approval at the triennial general convention. Usually the election process takes several ballots, as it did in Harris’s case; she was elected on the sixth ballot. Although her election was normal in that sense, the issues it raised were not.

The Anglican Communion, like the Roman Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity, regards bishops as possessing special authority. They are believed to constitute an unbroken line to Jesus Christ, who charged Simon, Peter, and his other disciples with leadership of his church. Before the selection of Harris, all such bishops had been men. Coming only thirteen years after the church’s acceptance of women priests, Harris’s selection shocked the more conservative elements of the Episcopal Church once again. The greatest outrage was that she was a woman. There were also objections to her irregular preparation (not a seminary graduate), her race, and her marital status (divorced), but all these traits had several or many precedents within the Episcopal Church’s recent history. Women priests and bishops have also been considered roadblocks to ecumenical outreach with the Catholic Church, although some Catholics see the existence of women priests as a hopeful sign that their church also can change.

Many Episcopalians expected that in her new role, Harris would serve as the leader of a movement for more radical social change. Although she continued to speak out, however, most of her work as a suffragan bishop was pastoral. She oversaw churches, sorted out parish disputes and problems, and performed standard duties such as confirming new members and ordaining clergy.

Almost fourteen years after her consecration as a bishop in 1989, she retired at the mandatory age of seventy-two. A slight, energetic woman with relatively good health and many friends, she worked for several years after retirement as an assisting bishop in the Washington, DC, diocese.

Significance

Harris played a pivotal role in the changes that have turned the once-staid Episcopal Church into a body shaken by radical changes. Her removal of the gender barrier to the church’s highest rank paved the way for other women bishops. In 2006 another barrier fell when Katharine Jefferts Schori became the twenty-sixth presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Harris’s career has been both symbolic of and a spur to further change in the Episcopal Church; to a lesser extent her career has influenced other mainstream Christian churches as well. These changes mirror, and attempt to cope with, events in the larger, secular society and world. The changes are aimed at a more inclusive church, one where social justice goals are viewed as a natural outcome of the work that Jesus himself did. As Harris’s story shows, these goals are controversial within the church, but the trend has been toward their realization.

Bibliography

Bozzuti-Jones, Mark Francisco. The Miter Fits Just Fine! A Story about the Right Reverend Barbara Clementine Harris. Cambridge: Cowley, 2003. Print..

Evans, Sara M. Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End. New York: Free, 2010. Print.

Harris, Barbara Clementine. Parting Words: A Farewell Discourse. Cambridge: Cowley, 2003. Print.

Nicholson, Aleathia Dolores. “Barbara Harris.” In Epic Lives: One Hundred Black Women Who Made a Difference. Ed. Jessie Carney Smith. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1993. Print.

House of Deputies Special Study. Shared Governance: The Polity of the Episcopal Church. New York: Church, 2012. Print.

Palmer, Michael D., and Stanley M. Burgess. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Social Justice. Malden: Wiley, 2012. Print.

Turner, Renee D. “The First Woman Episcopal Bishop: Elevation of Christian Social Activist Barbara C. Harris Causes Religious Stir.” Ebony May 1989: 40. Print.