The Rev. Alison Cheek, who battled canon law and centuries-old traditions to become one of the first female priests in the Episcopal Church and in 1974 was the first woman to administer the sacrament of Communion in an Episcopal parish, died Sept. 1 at an assisted-living facility in Brevard, N.C. She was 92.
The death was confirmed by a son, Timothy Cheek, who said he did not know the exact cause.
Rev. Cheek, who was raised as a Methodist in Australia, moved with her family to Northern Virginia in 1957 and began attending St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale because it was the closest church to her home.
She became increasingly interested in theology and began to study at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria while raising her four children. She became a deacon in 1972 and two years later was one of 11 women ordained by three retired bishops who supported the cause of women in the priesthood. Because the ceremony took place in Philadelphia, they became known as the “Philadelphia 11.”
They faced strong opposition from traditionalists. At the time, the Episcopal Church allowed only men to be ordained, and the hierarchy of the church considered Rev. Cheek and the other female priests to be renegades.
“At our ordinations, when the time was set aside for objections,” Rev. Cheek told The Washington Post in 1976, one priest said, “ ‘These women can offer up nothing but the sight and smell of perversion.’ So that makes me see how very thin is the veneer of civilization over this fear of women’s sexuality.”
In a prolonged battle, the church hierarchy sought to have the female priests’ ordinations thrown out as illegal under canon law. The women successfully argued that their ordinations were “irregular” but not illegal. Many of the 11, including Rev. Cheek, took up pastoral duties.
When Rev. Cheek was scheduled to celebrate the Eucharist at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, the church’s rector, William A. Wendt, was forced to cancel the service on orders from his bishop, William F. Creighton.
Later, on Nov. 10, 1974, Wendt and Rev. Cheek tested the authorities again. Wearing a clerical collar and vestments, Rev. Cheek performed Communion at Wendt’s church — the first time any female priest had conducted the sacrament in an Episcopal sanctuary. A report in The Post noted that the service “ranged from solemn prayer to joyous hugs and bursts of spontaneous applause.”
The event led to two years of upheaval and soul-searching in the Episcopal Church. Bishop Creighton, who supported the ordination of women, took action after 18 priests signed a letter of complaint. Wendt was tried by an ecclesiastical court for disobeying the bishop’s orders.
“It was very hard, Sunday after Sunday, to do my work at the altar as a deacon in the church which oppresses me,” Rev. Cheek said at his trial.
Wendt was admonished, but in an act of defiance he hired Rev. Cheek as an assistant pastor at St. Stephen. As other women became ordained as “irregular” priests, the Episcopal Church as a whole became embroiled in a fierce internal battle. Rev. Cheek and the other members of the Philadelphia 11 were featured on the cover of Time magazine in January 1976 as “Women of the Year.”
“I think the visual image of a woman behind the altar is important,” Rev. Cheek told the Houston Chronicle in 2006. “I don’t like to generalize, but I think we bring a more human touch, and that can create a different atmosphere.”
In September 1976, the governing bodies of the Episcopal Church voted to approve women as ordained members of the clergy. Liberal elements of the faith were jubilant, but some conservative factions broke away from the church for good.
In the years since Rev. Cheek first stood before a congregation in Washington, women have entered the Episcopal priesthood in increasing numbers and now make up close to half of the church’s clergy.
“Every woman in a leadership position in the Episcopal Church owes our vocation and freedom to those very strong women,” Mariann Edgar Budde, who is the first woman to serve as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, said in an interview. “It’s almost impossible for us to imagine the costs and their scars. This was hard. We stand on their shoulders, every single one of us, men and women.”
Alison Mary Western was born April 11, 1927, in Adelaide, Australia, and grew up on her family’s fruit farm.
She graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1947 and married her economics professor, Bruce Mansfield Cheek. They settled in the Washington area when he took a job with the World Bank.
At St. Alban’s in Annandale, the parish priest, John R. Frizzell Jr., encouraged Alison Cheek’s budding interest in theology. She received a master of divinity from the Virginia Theological Seminary in 1969.
In addition to her duties at St. Stephen, Rev. Cheek had a pastoral counseling practice. After her husband died in 1977, she became a priest at a church in Philadelphia. She later helped advance the movement for female priests in Australia and moved to Cambridge, Mass., where she received a doctorate in ministry from the Episcopal Divinity School in 1990 and directed its program in feminist liberation studies.
In 1996, she became a counselor and teacher at the Greenfire Community and Retreat Center in Tenants Harbor, Maine, where she also served as a priest. She retired in 2013 and moved to North Carolina.
Survivors include four children, Bruce Malcolm Cheek of Lexington, Ky., Jonathan Cheek of Wellesley, Mass., Timothy Cheek of Vancouver, B.C., and Bronwen Cheek of Santa Fe, N.M.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
In 2014, looking back on the 40th anniversary of her ordination, Rev. Cheek said that she “sort of risked everything” in her quest to become a priest.
“I would do it again,” she said.
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