Today the church celebrates one if its newest saints, Tim-Oi, the first Asian woman to be ordained a priest. Tim-Oi took the name Florence (after Florence Nightingale) after her baptism, and was subsequently known as Florence Li Tim-Oi.
Born in Hong Kong on the 5th of May 1907, she first heard a call to ordained ministry in 1931, following the ordination of a deaconess at the Cathedral in Hong Kong. She was ordained a deacon in 1941, following a 4 year course of study in Canton.
The lack of a priest in the congregation where she served led the Bishop of Hong Kong to give her permission to do so, then on January 25, 1944, the Bishop ordained her a priest. The controversy which followed was so great, in 1946, that Tim-Oi surrendered her priest's licence, but not her Holy Orders, the knowledge of which carried her through Maoist persecution.
She resumed the practice of her priesthood in the Church in China, and in Toronto when she retired in 1981. She was awarded Doctorates of Divinity by General Theological Seminary, New York, and Trinity College, Toronto. She died on February 26, 1992, in Toronto, and is buried there. The 75th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, meeting in Minneapolis in 2003, voted to place her commemoration on this day, January 24th, for a three year period. In June of 2006 the 76th General Convention made the commemoration permanent.
Long before the 1970s, and in a land far away from the United States, the Church was blessed with the priestly gifts of a woman, one we now call St. Florence Li Tim-Oi.
