Betty Bone Scheiss

Betty Bone Scheiss was born in 1923 and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her family was not significantly religious; she wrote in her memoir, “I cannot imagine anyone with a family or an education less likely than mine to interest me in the church.”

Scheiss joined The Episcopal Church as an adult. She first attended the all-white St. Alban’s Church in Syracuse before moving to the integrated Grace Church in 1966, a year in which she also participated in the March Against Fear in Jackson, Mississippi. Additionally, she was a member of the 1967 delegation that proposed using more expansive language in the only church canon at the time that explicitly qualified that lay readers must be “male,” Under Canon 49, a woman could only be licensed as a lay reader if no men were available. The delegation’s lobbying efforts were successful with the qualification being changed to “person” in the 1970 Canons. Their success also encouraged Schiess to consider ordination. As she wrote later in her memoir, “It was never my ambition to be a Cardinal Rector...My ambition was bolder. It was to change The Episcopal Church and the society it presumed to serve.”

Suzanne Hiatt, Carol Anderson and Betty Schiess, three women seeking ordination, attend the 1970 General Convention in Houston, Texas.

Scheiss attended the Rochester Center for Theological Studies and was ordained a deacon on June 25, 1972. She worked as a curate at Grace Church in Baldwinsville, New York, which she described as a “typical parish.” This made its support of her ordination to the priesthood all the more important, as a “typical parish” could not be dismissed as having radical views. On July 29, 1974, she was ordained a priest alongside the other women of the “Philadelphia Eleven,” the first women to be ordained priests in The Episcopal Church.

After her ordination, Scheiss served as an associate rector at Grace Church in Syracuse, New York, where she was also the director of the Mizpah Educational and Cultural Center for the Aging. She also served for ten years on the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, a bioethics advisory body, which she called “the most satisfying years of [her] professional life.”

In 1984, she was hired as the rector of Grace Church in Mexico, New York, and served in that position for five years. She traveled widely, preached around the world, interviewed the Dalai Lama, and wrote a letter to her local paper on immigration policy that garnered her more hate mail than her ordination. She died on October 20, 2017.