Faith Guides Alum's Trailblazing Ways

Jesuit Mission
Sonya Quitsland, ‘58
College of Arts and Sciences

At age 10, Sonya Quitslund, ’58, would dress in her mother’s black gown and gather her younger sisters, Tanya and Ingrid, in the basement of their house to say Mass. If her sisters performed well, they got a white Necco wafer.

“I couldn't understand why my brother didn't want to be an altar boy,” says Quitslund, this year’s recipient of the Jesuit Mission Award. “I would have given anything to be an altar server.”

Quitslund, 91, also would have become a priest if ordination was open to women, but she believes opening up the priesthood to women is inevitable. 

“I think that the Church is missing a major opportunity by ignoring the gifts women could bring,” she says.

It’s not a surprising position coming from the person who founded the Christian Feminists and was one of the first members of the Women's Ordination Conference, writing in 1977, “If (a) woman is just as much in the image and likeness of God, why is she not also in the image of Christ?” (Quitslund split with the Women's Ordination Conference when it supported the unauthorized ordination of several women.)

At Seattle University Quitslund, an English major, found allies including James McGoldrick, S.J., the Jesuit who defied his peers in 1933 and opened up then Seattle College to women—and who would slip Quitslund some cash to help pay for textbooks. And her psychology professor, James Royce, S.J., who encouraged her to not be intimidated by male students and ask questions out loud in class.

“I figured if that’s what father wants me to do, I'll do it,” she says.

Her faith journey as a young woman continued as a Fulbright Scholar in France where, by coincidence, she met the future SU President William Sullivan, S.J., who at the time was a student. 

From SU Quitslund would go on to earn her MA and PhD from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., before becoming a professor of theology at George Washington University, where she taught for 28 years. 

During summer breaks Quitslund returned to the Seattle area to visit family and taught summer classes at SU. Over the years she was also a foster parent to 48 children, an experience that led her to endow a scholarship—as part of the existing Fostering Scholars program—for Seattle University students who had been placed in foster care. The Leona and Phelps Quitslund Scholarship is named after her parents, who encouraged her education.

“I realized that the process, the system, was not really working for them,” she says of what motivated her to donate to the scholarship.

Finding another way to serve while in the nation’s capital, she commenced what would become a 36-year career in the Coast Guard Auxiliary. She retired at the rank of commander, having flown more than 300 missions as a lookout in aircraft searching for mariners in distress. Despite the high stakes of her missions, she found it a welcome break from academia.

After retiring from George Washington University, she left the other Washington and returned to her family’s homestead on Bainbridge Island. 

Theology and Catholicism were not a large part of Quitslund’s upbringing, as her parents wanted their children to find their own way. That came to an end in a hurry when her parents learned that to attend St. Anne School she had to be baptized.

“Pastor said, ‘No Baptism, no school,’ so I learned ‘Our Father’ and the Sign of the Cross and was admitted,” she says. “As I often tell my priest friends, I was forced into the church, there's no way they're going to get rid of me now.”