A year after she was one of 11 women ordained in Philadelphia to the Episcopalian priesthood, at a time when the denomination’s hierarchy wouldn’t officially recognize them as priests, the Rev. Alison Cheek took stock of the difference between public perception and her personal calling.
“Some people call me a rebel. Well, the truth is that I’m not rebelling against anything or anybody,” she told the Globe in late September 1975.
“I’m living creatively — and at a high risk. I could lose my career and some golden friendships,” she added. “But, in the final analysis, what does it matter? Right now I don’t have a sense of belonging — so I’m living for the moment.”
The Rev. Cheek, who was one of what became known as the Philadelphia 11 when they were ordained in 1974, and who later taught at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, died Sept. 1 in her Brevard, N.C., home. She was 92. Her son Timothy told The New York Times that the cause was congestive heart failure.
She and 10 other women made history on June 29, 1974, when they were ordained at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia in a ceremony not authorized by the Episcopal Church’s leadership.
“The church dismisses the women’s movement as only secular,” she told a Knight Ridder reporter in 1980. “It fails to take into account the new lifestyles and aspirations of women.”
Two years after the Philadelphia 11 were ordained, the church formally allowed the ordination of women as priests. By 1985 about 600 had been ordained. In 1989, Barbara Harris became the first female Episcopal bishop. But the initial reaction was hard to endure, the Rev. Cheek said in a 40th anniversary video made for the church in 2014.
“All the nastiness that happened right after the ordination would have been unbearable if we hadn’t all stuck together,” she said.
After being ordained, the Rev. Cheek initially maintained her practice as a pastoral psychotherapist, yet she recalled in the 1980 interview that she immediately became a public figure.
“Those were exciting, but very painful and unusual years,” she said.
Alison Mary Western was born on April 11, 1927, in Adelaide, Australia, to Hedley Western and Dora Whiting. Her father was a fruit farmer; her mother a homemaker.
She graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1947 and married Bruce M. Cheek, her economics tutor there. In 1957, when he got a job at the World Bank, they settled in Washington.
The Rev. Cheek became a lay minister for several congregations and in 1963 was one of the first two women admitted to the Virginia Theological Seminary’s master of divinity program. She graduated in 1969 and became a deacon in 1972.
Two years later, she received a life-changing telephone call from Nancy Wittig, who was helping to plan the groundbreaking ordination and would become one of the Philadelphia 11. It was a recruitment pitch.
“My heart was leaping up and shouting, ‘Yes, oh, yes,’ ” the Rev. Cheek said in an account in “The Story of the Philadelphia Eleven,” a 2014 book by Darlene O’Dell, but “my body was registering symptoms of panic; my head was beginning to calculate the risks.”
Those included her ability to remain in the United States, where she was on a work visa. If she were deposed by the church — permanently excluded from any ministry — it could mean, she thought, the end of her private counseling practice, which had grown out of her church training.
But, she said, she experienced an odd sensation, one similar to her reaction to her grandfather’s death when she was 12: She felt that an era had ended.
“Something deep inside me recognized the inevitability of it,” she wrote.
Though the House of Bishops, a church governing body, declared the ordinations of the 11 invalid, the Rev. Cheek remained defiant. “I would invite the presiding bishop and the House of Bishops into a new age,” she said in a sermon that August.
In late October 1974, she and two other members of the Philadelphia 11, the Rev. Carter Hayward and the Rev. Jeannette Ridlon Piccard, celebrated the Eucharist at the interdenominational Riverside Church in New York City before 1,500 people who burst into applause when the three walked to the altar.
In a statement at the time, the women responded to a declaration by the House of Bishops that affirmed the ordination of women “in principle” but that still did not endorse the Philadelphia ceremony. They wrote: “While we rejoice in this action, we must note that women do not exist merely ‘in principle.’ We are people and we are priests.”
Weeks later, the Rev. Cheek celebrated the Eucharist at a Washington church, whose website records the event this way:
“On November 10, 1974, the Rev. Alison Cheek stood before the altar of St. Stephen and the Incarnation Church, said the words ‘On the night before he died for us, our Lord Jesus Christ broke bread,’ and thus launched the public ministry of Episcopal women priests in their own church.”
The Rev. Cheek was not universally embraced there, however.
“Often there is clear-cut animosity at the Communion services at which I officiate,” she told the Globe in 1975. “Some people — mostly men — won’t come to the rail. And, yes, there are inevitable character assassinations behind your back.”
In 1977, her husband died, at 51, of a heart attack.
“It really blew me away. I’m only just beginning to feel alive again,” she said in the 1980 interview, adding that her spiritual and emotional relationships at church helped her through the loss.
She subsequently became codirector of a church fund-raising program in Philadelphia. In 1996, she graduated with a doctorate from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, where she taught and directed the feminist liberation studies program. She later became a teacher at the Greenfire women’s retreat in Tenants Harbor, Maine, before retiring in 2013.
In addition to her son Timothy, she leaves two other sons, Malcolm and Jonathan; a daughter, Bronwen Cheek; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Being part of the Philadelphia 11, the Rev. Cheek said, had opened her eyes to the obstacles faced by other groups that felt marginalized by the church.
“Quite a few oppressed groups of folk then reached out to us and wanted us to come and celebrate for them,” she said in the 2014 video.
In 2004, for example, she and Carter Heyward officiated at the weddings of two lesbian couples. “I feel as though my consciousness was raised, but it certainly got raised a lot higher after the ordination,” the Rev. Cheek said.
In the 1980 Knight Ridder interview, she said that “for me, the roots of my feminism came out of the church.”
“That’s where I heard that women and men are equal, in the preaching of the Gospel, not in the structure of the institution — it’s a double message women get,” the Rev. Cheek added. “At the height of the Gospel, Jesus is a feminist. He doesn’t put down women.”
Material from The New York Times was used in this report.