The Reverend Kathleen J Cullinane is the first female priest nominated in the Diocese of Los Angeles for the post of Bishop Coadjutor, or as any Bishop at all.
At about the same time that the Anglican Diocese of Trinidad and Tobago was going through the process of selecting a Bishop Coadjutor at the end of last year, Reverend Cullinane was one of six Anglican priests to have been nominated at the Diocesan Convention on November 13, 1999. Needing a straight majority, unlike the two- thirds majority in this Diocese, she was beaten in the eighth ballot for the position by Dean Jon Bruno, who won by a simple majority of both clergy and laity, and is to be consecrated on the Saturday after Easter.
Reverend Cullinane, who was on a week long visit to Trinidad and Tobago explained: "A slate of four male clergy was put forward by the nominating committee. Dean Bruno and myself were nominated from the floor on the day of the Convention, which is allowed. The two of us were front-runners from the very beginning."
Ordained a priest for eleven years, and now rector of St Mary's Parish in the Korea Town area of Los Angeles, the lady priest, and Reverend Connor Lynn, rector of St Mary Palms in West Los Angeles, accompanied the Right Reverend Chester L. Talton, Suffragan Bishop of The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles to this country.
Because Trinidad and Tobago was a place where afro-Caribbeans and asian-Caribbeans mixed easily, Bishop Talton assumed "you had something to teach us. We all work in areas where there is a mixture of people from all over the world, predominantly Phillipino, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and Nigerians."
As Suffragan Bishop, Reverend Talton, a priest for 29 years, and Bishop for nine years, assists The Right Reverend Frederick Borsch, Bishop of the very large Diocese of Los Angeles.
Reverend Talton, who grew up in President Clinton's hometown of Arkansas, and has served in the Bay Area of California, Chicago, Minnesota and New York, explained that the Diocese of Los Angeles, one of six in the state of California, covers most of southern California except for the very most southern end of the state where the Diocese of San Diego exists.
The Suffragan Bishop deals with 150 congregations in the Diocese of Los Angeles "in one way or another." To cope with this, the Diocese has been informally separated into three areas, and three Bishops each cover an area. Bishop Talton covers the middle area where there is a mixture of people from all over the world, and there are five predominantly black congregations and 25 Spanish speaking congregations. "It is a very diverse diocese, some of those people are in mixed congregations, others disbursed into predominantly white congregations, but more and more people are finding their way into mixed congregations, nowadays I see change in a much more pronounced way after visiting the congregations."
How does the Bishop cope with a very important Anglican event? Confirmations for 150 congregations. "About fifty congregations all get together for confirmations after Easter. With ten deaneries, there will be one Bishop, sometimes two, every Sunday in a different church, all attached to the Cathedral Center of St Paul, which is situated at Echo Park Avenue in Los Angeles, near downtown Los Angeles."
Bishop Talton finds the shortage of people coming into the clergy more acute here in Trinidad than in L.A. where it is fairly new and now beginning to show itself: "For a number of reasons, firstly, at one time there was an over supply and we stopped recruiting and encouraging people to join the Ministry. Then, a lot of people made late vocations, we expected those people would serve the church long after the age of 65, and continue to be active and vital. But these people got tired, as they went up into their sixties, retired and this led to an acute shortage. Also, we have not been encouraging young people to go directly from College to the Seminary for ordination, so many people feel the need sometimes to teach or do another profession and gain some experience in life, to sort of get ready for the Ministry so that they can relate to lots of people. The result is that the young people have gone into other fields rather than Ministry. Campus Ministries also have declined, and there are not very many active, strong university Chaplaincies."
"The church is now recognising there is a shortage and that we have not really recruited young people, and that the church is not as able to lead young people as we really need to do."
Although Reverend Cullinane's ordination was a long time coming, her promotion to priest was quick: "Six months standard time for my class, everybody was ordained priest together." The prejudice she recalls being faced with as a woman in the clergy "was really in the fact that I was turned down twice for ordination, that is before entering the General Theological Seminary in New York, because I was a woman." She spent one year in Uganda as a missionary "during my seminary days and will happily return as a missionary if it comes."
No stranger to the Caribbean, Reverend Lynn, a graduate of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific at Berkeley, has been a priest since 1956. The nearly seventy-year old who thinks of retirement "and sure don't think of being Bishop", started off as a monk of the Holy Cross before being ordained a priest in Africa. He has served for six years at St George the Martyr in South Caicos in the Turks & Caicos Islands; divided his time for15 years between New York and as a missionary in West Africa; has visited Trinidad and Tobago many times trying to encourage vocations to the Order of the Holy Cross of which Canon Winston Joseph is an Associate; spent five months in Guyana in the 60's; and also a lot of time in the Bahamas at the parish of St Luke's at Rock Sound.
Reverend Lynn's proud boast was that in his parish at St Mary Palms, there are three Trinidadians, and the people's warden is a lady from the Virgin Islands. "She is very good. Her father was from St Kitts her mother the Virgin Islands, but she is a native Californian."