Religion: Skirts & Sacraments

In Stockholm’s Great Church, lights blazed and television cameras blinked one day last week as Lutheran Bishop Helge Ljungberg solemnly placed an alb and gold-embroidered chasuble over the shoulders of a brand-new minister in Sweden’s Lutheran state church. The minister: Elisabeth Durle, 30, who studied pharmacology before she switched to theology, plans to be a suburban curate. Also ordained elsewhere on the same day: Ingrid Persson, 48, who passed her theological exams in 1936 and has been a deaconess since 1949; Margit Sahlin, 46, who is already a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches and secretary of the Swedish Deacon Foundation.

The ordination of the first female ministers in Sweden recalls a longstanding ecclesiastical dispute (TIME, Oct. 21, 1957). A few Protestant denominations in the U.S. (e.g., the Northern Presbyterians and the Methodists) have some female ministers. But to many Christians, the ordination of women was still a long and revolutionary way from the admonishment of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians: “Let your women keep silence in the churches” (I Corinthians 14:34). At least one of the antifeminist fears—the thought of a pregnant woman in a pulpit—was no immediate prospect. All three ministeresses are unmarried.