From finding faith to leading a congregation: Alexandra Jacobea's path to becoming a pastor
Can a woman be ordained a priest? In the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, this has been a reality since 1953. Since then, more than 200 women have been ordained in the largest Protestant church in Bohemia. Today, women pastors make up about 30% of the Protestant clergy. They include single, married, and divorced women, both with and without children. One of them is Alexandra Jacobea, pastor of the Evangelical congregation in Dejvice, Prague.
Alexandra Jacobea is 40 years old and hails from Brno. Her unusual surname is a nod to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. She didn't grow up in a Christian family, but she always had friends who were Christians. Perhaps unusually, she shared her journey to faith with her parents, as she explains:
"I don’t think there was a single turning point for me. I’ve always believed from a young age, though we didn’t actively practice any particular faith. As a teenager, I felt a strong desire to become part of a community, and my parents shared that same wish. It became a journey we all embarked on together. After some searching, we found the congregation of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren in Brno-Husovice. It felt like the right place for us, and things quickly progressed from there. I decided to be baptized, and my parents chose to renew their marriage vows."
Jacobea graduated from a bilingual French high school in Brno and went on to study at the Evangelical Theological Faculty in Prague. She also spent a year studying theology in Geneva.
"At the University of Geneva, I was probably most influenced by a group of students with whom I was discussing whether or not to take ordination and become a parish priest. We had this very nice professor, who couldn’t stand it any longer, and asked: 'Has no one ever encouraged you?' And when we said 'yes', he said: Well, there's your answer.' And that was it. Until then, I thought I was going to teach French, because I had also been studying at the faculty of education."
To become a pastor within her church, Jacobea first did an internship and then joined the church staff, completing another year of work experience, called vicarage:
"This means that one works in a congregation with an experienced colleague and, at the same time, goes to seminars for future vicars. If the vicar still feels up to it, they can become a pastor. I have been a pastor since the fall of 2011. At that time, I joined the Brno congregation, where I had previously completed the vicariate."
Since 2021, Jacobea has been based in Prague-Dejvice. Despite the traditional rivalry between Prague and Brno, she says she has been welcomed very positively and has not noticed any surprised or negative reactions:
"I have the impression that sometimes it is more of a challenge for congregations to accept a pastor or pastoral minister—this applies to both men and women—who are single. Congregations often expect that the pastors will bring their own family into the community. So you cannot always match those expectations."
Apart from serving in her parish church in Dejvice, Jacobea is also involved in a project called Nekostel (Non-Church), supported by the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, which aims to make the celebration of worship accessible to people who are not at home in the church or do not understand its language. Nekostel is held once a month in one of the rooms of the Rock Café on Národní třída.
"The service is always accompanied by live music, but unlike in a church service, you are not required to sing along with the others. In addition to the music, we also offer small refreshments after the service. So it's a space for sharing and talking about topics related to the sermon.”
As a female pastor, Jacobea has never encountered any limitations or negative reactions, though people outside her church sometimes react with surprise when she tells them what she does for a living:
"Some people are surprised because they simply don't know that a woman can do this job. But I feel that is gradually getting better. When I started at the age of 26, the surprised reactions were much more frequent. Sometimes, I get some unpleasant comments, but compared to the positive response I get, it is negligible."
In her job, she doesn’t feel any advantage in being a woman, she says, adding that she has always tried to resist the division between women and men in this respect:
"I think our work is more about our own personality. You need to be able to listen, to have empathy, but that's not something exclusively female. I have a number of male colleagues who are very strong in that area."
In her role, Jacobea works with children, youth, families, and people with disabilities, conducting baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and providing spiritual accompaniment. However, when asked what she enjoys most about being a parish priest, this is her response:
"Preparing sermons and planning services. I say this with some trepidation because I have stage fright before every service. It's always a struggle, but I love the process."
From the first Hussite parish female priest to today's women of the Church
Paradoxically, the first women parish priests were ordained in Czechoslovakia during a time of oppression, when religious life was severely restricted by the totalitarian regime. The Czechoslovak Hussite Church, founded in 1920, became one of the first in Europe to ordain women, doing so in 1947, just before the onset of the communist dictatorship.
Today, nearly half of the women clergy in the Hussite Church are ordained as priests or deacons. While the first two women to be ordained, Olga Pešková-Kounovská (who broke ideologically with the Church and left it in 1953 due to her leftist views) and Naděžda Brázdilová (who served as a clergywoman in Turnov until 2001), have faded into obscurity, the Hussite Church now boasts a number of prominent and well-known female figures. Among its most notable ministers are Martina Viktorie Kopecká, a woman of many talents and activities, who also lives in a union with another woman, and Sandra Silná, a clergywoman in Brno and a single mother with hobbies that include beekeeping and brewing beer.
The Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, one of the three largest churches in the country alongside the Roman Catholic and Hussite Churches, has been ordaining women since 1953. However, debates on the status of women within the Church have been ongoing since its founding in 1918. It wasn't until 2003 that the first woman was appointed senior pastor, the highest representative of the regional church body.
In December 1953, four women were ordained in Poděbrady: Alena Šounová for the congregation in Příbram, Antonie Slámová for the congregation in Poděbrady, Eva Nechutová for the congregation in Libštát, and Jarmila Hartová for the congregation in Děčín. Antonie Slámová's story is particularly inspiring. Despite being paralyzed in her right arm after contracting polio at the age of eight, she defied expectations. Although she excelled academically, she was initially denied entry to high school because of her disability. It was only after an intervention by the authorities that she was able to graduate from the gymnasium and, later, from the Hus's Czechoslovak Faculty of Theology in 1938, where she became one of the first women to graduate. In 1953, she became the first evangelical pastor in Bohemia to officiate at a marriage.
Additionally, it's worth mentioning that Růžena Opočenská, the first female theology graduate in Bohemia, began her studies at the Jan Hus Czechoslovak Faculty of Theology in 1922. Though she was never ordained as a pastor, she effectively served in this capacity during World War II when her husband, Bohumír Opočenský, the pastor of the evangelical congregation in Klášter nad Dědinou, was imprisoned in a concentration camp.
Today, one of the prominent women in the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren is Vendula Glancová, a pastor in Hvozdnice near Prague. She is also a psychotherapist and prison chaplain and recently staged the musical West Side Story with inmates from correctional facilities in Příbram and Světlá nad Sázavou. The Silesian Evangelicals and Methodists in Bohemia also ordain women, and the Czech Old Catholic Church ordained two women as priests for the first time in 2024.
Although the ordination of women priests is forbidden by the Vatican, Bishop Felix Maria Davídek secretly ordained an entire generation of priests in communist Czechoslovakia, including married men and three women. The founder of the so-called underground church believed that, in a time of unbearable political oppression, it was necessary to do what was otherwise considered impossible. In 1970, he ordained his first woman, Ludmila Javorová, a close associate, for ministry "in women's prisons and camps." She was officially forbidden from exercising her priestly ministry in 1996. Now 93 years old, Javorová shared in an interview with Memory of the Nation:
"When I received a paper, which was not even handed to me personally by the bishop, stating that everything was forbidden and invalid, it didn’t affect me. I told myself, ‘Yes, I admit that humanity is not prepared for this, for such an experience.’"
Related
-
Czech female pioneers and their modern successors
Discover the inspiring stories of women who have made it in 'traditionally male' professions, and learn about the female pioneers who first paved the way.
