50 years ago, 11 women went around the country asking Episcopal bishops to ordain them as priests. Only a North Philly Black church agreed to host.

In 1974, a group of 11 women, all Episcopal deacons from around the country, sought to be ordained as priests, something then unheard of in the Episcopal Church, whose roots date back to shortly after the American Revolution.

Why did the ordinations end up happening in Philadelphia, of all places, at the height of the Frank Rizzo era?

The women had asked Episcopal churches around the country to host the ordinations, and the Church of the Advocate at 18th and Diamond Streets in North Philadelphia — a predominantly Black church active in the civil rights movement which had hosted events with the Black Panther Party — was the only one that agreed.

Paul Washington, the Church of the Advocate rector and a Philadelphia activist fixture who later served on the MOVE Commission, played a crucial part in the decision and participated in the ordination.

And so, on July 29, 1974, a trio of male bishops — Robert L. DeWitt, Daniel Corrigan, and Edward R. Welles II — held an “irregular ordination” of 11 women (collectively known as the Philadelphia Eleven) as priests in the Episcopal Church, defying the church’s General Convention.

It’s an unheralded moment in American religious history that changed that Church forever. As the event’s 50th anniversary approaches, the story of the ordination and everything that followed is the subject of a new documentary called The Philadelphia Eleven.

The 1974 ordination was seen as an act of civil disobedience and was highly controversial at the time.

As the documentary tells us, the Episcopal Church’s Rev. Canon Charles Osborn called the ordinations “unlawful and schismatical, constituting a grave injury to Christ’s Church.”

“We do not gain 11 priests today,” the Rev. George Rutler said after the ordinations. “We lose four bishops …. you may break the laws, sirs — our savior broke many laws — what you break today is a law he did not break. That law is this, God shall be called ‘Father,’ and so should his priests.”

The film notes that the bishop of Kentucky declared he’d respond to the ordination of women by returning to his home state to “ordain the great racehorse Secretariat.”

Later that year, a separate ordination in Washington of women known as the Washington Four was held.

The Episcopal House of Bishops voted to invalidate the ordinations, punish the bishops, and take up the issue at the Church Convention in 1976. While the Philadelphia Eleven were present at that meeting in Chicago, they were not allowed in the room, where the Church voted to recognize the ordinations and to allow the ordination of women.

Today, more than 6,000 women serve as Episcopal priests throughout the United States, with women making up more than 40% of the ranks of active priests in the Church.

The 11 women ordained in Philadelphia on that July day were the Revs. Merrill Bittner, Alla Renée Bozarth, Alison Cheek, Emily Hewitt, Carter Heyward, Suzanne Hiatt, Marie Moorefield Fleischer, Jeanette Piccard, Betty Bone Schiess, Katrina Swanson, and Nancy Wittig. While all were previously deacons, the women came from all over the country and from many different backgrounds, ages, walks of life, and political worldviews.

Their story is so historically underknown that Margo Guernsey, the film’s director, was unaware of it until shortly before beginning work on the project.

Back in 2012, while researching an unrelated project, Guernsey spoke with Heyward, by then a well-known feminist theologian and priest. In the course of their conversation, Guernsey said Heyward “had to share a little bit of her story, to give some context, and I was blown away that … as a student of the civil rights movement, as a student of history of that era, that I had never heard of this.”

“It very much became almost a call to tell the story,” Guernsey said. “I really think it should be part of our understanding of American history in the 20th century and of the various movements for greater equality.”

The film’s lengthy production process began in 2015.

The documentary had its first screening last September at the Church of the Advocate, in the same room where the ordinations took place.

“All of that archival footage in the church, to see it projected in the same space, was really quite moving,” Guernsey said of the premiere.

Five of the six Philadelphia Eleven still living — Bittner, Moorefield, Hewitt, Heyward, and Wittig — were present on a panel for the Church of the Advocate premiere. (Alla Bozarth-Campbell is still alive but was unable to travel.) The Rev. Betty Powell, one of the Washington Four who now lives in Delaware, was also there.

“What we did was about more than making the ordination of women to the priesthood a reality in the Episcopal Church,” the Rev. Merrill Bittner said in a post-screening conversation at the September event. “We did do that, and I believe it has transformed the Church.”

“I think every one of us is given opportunities to make the world a better place. The challenge for us is to recognize those times in our lives, and to be willing to say yes to them … and say ‘Here I am. Send me.’”

What can we take away from those events nearly 50 years later?

“More than anything else, what I hope viewers take away … is the ways in which these women stood in solidarity with each other. They did not always agree; in fact … they often disagreed,” Guernsey said. ”[But] they figured out ways to stand in solidarity around issues that really mattered and have civil conversations and respect differences where they disagreed. I think that’s a lesson we can all learn from today.”

‘The Philadelphia Eleven’ screens May 21 at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, 824 Lancaster Ave, Bryn Mawr. A post-screening Q&A will be held, with the Rev. JoAnn Bradley Jones, the Rev. Thomas Szczerba, and the Rev. Dr. Flora Keshgegian, with Roberta Torian moderating. brynmawrfilm.org/event/the-philadelphia-eleven/