Wrist Slap for Wendt

After eleven women were ordained as the first female priests in the Episcopal church in a much disputed irregular service last summer, the church's House of Bishops declared the ordinations invalid. To the Rev. William Wendt, the ardently progressive rector of the Church of St. Stephen and the Incarnation in Washington, D.C., the bishops' ruling was an inescapable challenge. He permitted one of the women, Alison Cheek, to celebrate the Eucharist in his parish. Soon, 18 priests in the diocese brought charges of disobedience against Wendt, setting the stage for a rare ecclesiastical trial (TIME, May 12).

Last week a five-member panel of priests and laymen voted 3 to 2 to find Wendt guilty. The three priests in the majority (the two dissenters were the laymen) urged Washington Bishop William Creighton to "admonish" Wendt and forbid him to permit "any person whose ordination is not in conformity with the canons of the church"--like one of the women priests, for instance--to function as a minister in his parish. At a press conference, Wendt called his sentence "a real slap on the wrist" and said that he would appeal the conviction or seek a new trial. He also cited the two lay judges' forceful dissent supporting the validity of Cheek's priesthood: "A great moment in church history is before us, and the majority of this court is allowing it to pass by." Even so, the controversy over whether the church should admit female priests is certain to continue into late 1976, when the church hopes to settle the issue at its triennial General Convention.

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