Katharine Jefferts Schori

American bishop

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History

Katharine Jefferts Schori (born March 26, 1954, Pensacola, Florida, U.S.) is an American prelate who was the first female presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (2006–15).

Jefferts was raised as a Roman Catholic and was educated by nuns at a convent school until her parents began attending Episcopal services when she was nine. She earned a bachelor’s degree (1974) in biology from Stanford University and a master’s (1977) and doctorate (1983) in oceanography from Oregon State University, where she specialized in the evolution of squids and octopuses of the northeastern Pacific. In 1979 she married Richard Schori, a theoretical mathematician. She later worked as an oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle before earning a master’s degree in divinity at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California, in 1994. That year she was ordained as a priest. Jefferts Schori served as assistant rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan in Corvallis, Oregon, until her election as bishop of Nevada in 2001.

In 2003 Jefferts Schori was one of the bishops who voted to confirm the election of the Rev. V. Gene Robinson as bishop of the diocese of New Hampshire—the first openly gay man to be elected an Anglican bishop. Three years later she was nominated to serve as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. After defeating six men in the election at the church’s General Convention in Columbus, Ohio, in June 2006, she became the first woman chosen as a churchwide leader in the 400-year history of the Anglican Communion. Jefferts Schori was formally installed on November 4, 2006. Her election—praised by progressives and criticized by conservatives—intensified the growing division within the Anglican Communion. Her nine-year term ended in 2015, and she was succeeded by Michael Curry, the first African American elected to the post.