Press Release
For immediate release
[April 13, 2020] Houston, Texas – The Episcopal Diocese of Texas and the Bishop of Texas, C. Andrew Doyle, invite you to celebrate the Pauli Murray Feast on Sunday, June 27, 2021.
Usually, the Episcopal Church celebrates the feast of Pauli Murray on July 1 or the following Sunday. However, this year, due to the 4th of July weekend, the Diocese of Texas and the Texas Pauli Murray Scholarship Committee is celebrating it on June 27.
The Texas Pauli Murray Scholarship Committee produced the following liturgies and resources to use for the feast:
- A Eucharistic Liturgy for June 27 in English and Spanish
- A Morning Prayer liturgy for July 1 (or whenever you would like to use it), which can be readily converted into Evening Prayer.
- A short, taped sermon by Bishop Phoebe A. Roaf, Diocese of West Tennessee
- A short 3-minute video about Pauli Murray and the scholarship
- A brief biography of Pauli Murray, tailored for a bulletin insert or e-news.
The Texas Pauli Murray Scholarship Committee also helps raise living expense scholarship to assist low-income African American seminarians and seminarians of color at the Seminary of the Southwest. The Diocese of Texas also helps financially support this effort, which seeks to expand the diversity of our clergy. If you would like to donate or learn more about the scholarship, use this link.
The Rev. Pauli Murray is one of the Church’s contemporary saints. She is the first African American woman ordained priest. She was also a renowned civil rights lawyer and helped to strategize some of the most important civil rights cases. She worked with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then an attorney, to successfully devise a constitutional test to protect women against discrimination.
