For the first time in history, Swedish female priests outnumber their male counterparts, sixty years after they were first allowed to don the clerical collar, the Church of Sweden said Wednesday. Of the 3,060 priests currently serving in Sweden, 1,533 are female, or 50.1 percent, according to Cristina Grenholm, secretary for the Church of Sweden. “From a historical perspective, this parity happened faster than we earlier imagined. A report from 1990 estimated that women would be half of the total clergy in 2090. And it took thirty years,” Grenholm told AFP. Unlike the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church of Sweden has allowed female priests since 1958 and first ordained three women in 1960. In 1982 the Swedish parliament also scrapped a “conscience clause” that allowed members of the clergy to refuse to cooperate with a female colleague. Women have been over-represented on theological courses, especially since the separation of church and state in 2000, and accounted for 70 percent of those training for ordination in a study in 2013.
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