NEW YORK (RNS) — When the Rev. Winnie Varghese, 53, took a seat on the broad steps of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, as the late afternoon sun beat down across New York City, there were tears apparent in her eyes.
“What a beautiful responsibility it is to have to think about how to care for people and how to care for community,” Varghese told RNS outside the cathedral on Monday (July 14), on the heels of being named the church’s new dean. “How do you get your head around it, you know?
“St. John the Divine was so in my imagination as a young person, a place where really magical things happened,” Varghese said. “In my growing-up mind, it was kind of a big statement of what the church was supposed to be about.”
Born to immigrant Indian parents and raised in Dallas, Varghese first encountered the historic cathedral not in person, but in the pages of her local newspaper. She remembered, as a 12-year-old, reading about a winding procession of camels, elephants and other animals making their way around the church for its annual St. Francis Day celebration, a tradition that honors St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and ecology.
“It shifted my imagination from what I thought were the narrow lanes of what faith had to do with to the entire planet,” Varghese said. “That there’s nothing that our faith doesn’t have to do with, that God doesn’t have to do with.”
On July 1, Varghese became the first woman elected to lead the largest Episcopal cathedral in the United States. She lives in New York City with her spouse and two grown children. The appointment of Varghese, a queer woman of Indian descent, to the prominent pulpit represents the Episcopal church’s continued push toward inclusion and its outspoken embrace of many progressive causes, especially around immigration and LGBTQ affirmation.
Varghese is known for her leadership on these issues, frequently speaking on LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice and the public life of the church. In 2022, she preached at the Washington National Cathedral for a Sunday Pride service.
“She is the future of our church,” said the Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, the canon theologian at the Washington National Cathedral and visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. Douglas was the first Black woman to be elected as the dean of any Episcopal seminary in the world. She also served as co-chair on the search committee that ultimately hired Varghese.
“Because of who she is, because of the power, the competency of who she is, she’s going to be breaking a lot of glass ceilings,” Douglas said. “But for Winnie, it’s not simply about winning, it’s about who she’s bringing with her through those doors.”
Since 2021, Varghese has served as rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta, one of the largest Episcopal parishes in the region. Before that, she was the rector of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery in Manhattan’s East Village. She is also the author of two books: “Church Meets World” and “What We Shall Become.” Still, when she was considering applying for her current role, uncertainty lingered.
“I remember thinking, people like me don’t do jobs like that,” she said.
The Rt. Rev. Matthew Heyd, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, played an important role in Varghese’s appointment as dean, naming the search committee that set out to find the cathedral’s next leader.
A colleague who has known Varghese for more than two decades, Heyd said her candidacy quickly rose to the top.
“Everywhere she’s been, her thinking, her preaching, her writing has transformed the community,” he said. “She helps widen our imagination for what’s possible, if we’re not afraid.” For Heyd, her election also signals an intention for the diocese at large. “There’s no more visible leadership role than being dean at the cathedral,” he said. “And we believe our diversity makes us stronger. So we want to model what we believe to the world.”
The Rev. Anne Marie Witchger, the current rector of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, has followed Varghese’s ministry for much of her adult life. Witchger was trained at Union Theological Seminary, where, according to her, Varghese, who graduated in 1999, remains something of a legend.
“I’m in awe of Winnie,” Witchger said. “She embodies the priesthood in a way that is authentic, thoughtful, courageous and wise.”
The two later connected through justice work in the Episcopal Diocese of New York, including a public response to the police killing of parishioner Deborah Danner and through diocesan racial justice pilgrimages to the South.
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When Varghese was elected rector of St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery, she recalled walking into her welcoming celebration to find a large plastic banner that read: “First woman!”
“I was like, oh God, that’s always true,” she said. “If I had thought about it that way, I think I would have been afraid. But to show up as yourself doing your best to do what you’re supposed to do, that seems possible.”
Ordained in 2000, Varghese entered the ministry at a time when hiring a queer woman of color into a leadership role in the Episcopal Church was uncommon. According to Church Pension Group data, from 2011 to 2021, only 14% of Episcopal priests identified as people of color; an even smaller share were women of color.
“I made no sense to people,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. This is the packaging I come in.”
Now, as Varghese begins to lead one of the world’s largest gothic cathedrals, the weight of the position is not lost on her. She is stepping into a tense political climate, especially in New York, where immigration policy and the threat of raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement looms large for faith-based communities, many of whom serve immigrants.
“At least for me, this is the first time in my life when I’m not sure anywhere feels protected,” Varghese said.
Like many faith leaders across the country, Varghese also confronts the challenge of declining church attendance, a reality she now faces at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In recent years, Sunday services at the cathedral have dwindled from five or six each week to just one or two, with weekly attendance dropping from the thousands in the cathedral’s heyday to approximately 350 parishioners today.
At St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Varghese faced similar concerns. In response, she asked parishioners to physically turn and face outward at the end of each service — a gesture meant to embody the call to welcome others in.
“There was nothing greater to building church community than to know that you came seeking something and you found it, invite others to take that journey with you,” Varghese said.
In New York, she hopes to create a similar outward-facing spirit and invite people back to the city’s most storied Episcopal cathedral.
Since its construction in 1892, St. John the Divine has forged an identity in New York City as the church of music and art. Its nave has staged jazz vespers and art installations ranging from Xu Bing’s phoenixes to Anne Patterson’s miles of colored ribbon. Paintings and photographs are routinely hung along the limestone walls. The last commissioned work by Keith Haring, the last work he completed before his death from AIDS at age 31, serves as the altarpiece in one of the cathedral’s chapels.
As dean, Varghese faces the challenge of stewarding the physical structure of the cathedral, nicknamed “St. John the Unfinished” for its long incomplete construction. Spanning 13 acres in Manhattan, the building demands constant upkeep. “There’s always a punch list, many million dollar punch list, that the head of facilities has,” Varghese said, noting that even routine updates like reinforcing stained glass or improving climate control can run into the millions.
One immediate project involves restoring the cathedral’s west wall, which must be completed before the organ can be reinstalled. “That’s a $4 million project,” she said. The Diocese of New York does not directly fund the cathedral.“We need to generate more income annually to sustain the program and the physical plant,” she said. “I’m inviting people that care about the mission of this place to put their money against their mission.”
Varghese said her goal is to carry on the legacy and to ensure the cathedral feels warm, accessible and alive.
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