Along the spiritual road to her groundbreaking role in the Episcopal Church, Barbara Clementine Harris was a volunteer prison chaplain who spent so much time praying with those behind bars that she could have tallied a two-year jail sentence of her own.
It wasn’t enough for her, though. “I was being led to the ordained ministry for a different dimension of service,” she told the Globe.
In 1989, she became the first woman consecrated as a bishop in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Bishop Harris, who had lived in Foxborough, was 89 when she died Friday night in Lincoln while in hospice care.
Her election in September 1988 as suffragan, or assistant bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, and her consecration the following February, broke the gender barrier for all major branches of Christianity that trace their bishops as successors to Christ’s apostles.