Singer, Activist and Founder of Katrina's Dream, Has Passed Away

BAR HARBOR, Maine, Dec. 17, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Rev. George Gaines Swanson, 86, an Episcopal priest and activist musician, died Dec. 5 in Lexington, Mass., where he had been receiving hospice care for several weeks. He had suffered for some years from heart disease and metastatic melanoma.

His wife, the Rev. Katrina Welles Swanson, who died in 2005, was one of 11 women who were "irregularly" ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in 1974. That action, while highly controversial at the time, led to the Episcopal Church's formal approval of the priestly ordination of women two years later.

Father Swanson, a native of San Francisco, CA, by his account combined his high school years with stints as a "hot shot" Forest Service firefighter, steelworker, construction laborer, Fuller Brush man, NRA rifle instructor, and fruit picker. He subsequently was a graduate of Harvard College and the General Theological Seminary in New York. At General, he founded the Chelsea Theater Guild ND played leading roles in several of its productions. After ordination to the priesthood, he served churches in Menlo Park and Coalinga, CA, Botswana, Kansas City, MO, and Jersey City, NJ. During his time in the African nation of Botswana, he became widely known as he toured the country's towns and villages singing Botswana's new national anthem as he accompanied himself on the banjo. 

His church in Jersey City, Ascension Episcopal Church, was almost totally destroyed by fire in 1986, a calamity that led to a bitter conflict between him and the Right Rev. John Shelby Spong, the then Episcopal bishop of Newark. Bishop Spong said Ascension's congregation—73 members according to church leaders, 16 according to the bishop—was too small to warrant rebuilding the church. He blocked release of the church's $847,477 fire insurance settlement and moved to divert the payment to other diocesan purposes.

Swanson sued Bishop Spong in a New Jersey court in an effort to force release of the insurance payment, and the bishop in turn brought charges against the priest in the Episcopal church court system, charging him with "knowingly and maliciously making false allegations in a civil suit against his bishop." In the first church trial ever held in the Diocese of Newark, Swanson was convicted of "conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy," but in 1990 a church court of appeal overturned the decision.

The victory proved hollow. The ruins of the church were bulldozed in 1993, the congregation dispersed, and Father Swanson found himself without a job. He turned to freelance banjo playing and singing while Katrina Swanson, the first woman rector in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area, continued as rector of St. John's Church, Union City, NJ, until she retired in 1996. The Swansons then moved to Manset, ME, where George went on banjo playing and singing, especially in summer on tour boats plying the waters around Bar Harbor.

Meantime he became deeply involved in battling clericalism in the church and in promoting the equality of women. Following Katrina's death he, his son William, William's wife Helene de Boissiere, and the Rev. Robert T. Coolidge, founded Katrina's Dream, Inc., a nonprofit organization that promotes the full inclusion of women in society. 

During his Maine years Swanson also became a passionate advocate of reform of the Maine prison system and an advocate of abolition of solitary confinement. This led to friendships with prisoners and ex-prisoners and advocacy of prison reform nationally. Aroused by the death of a prisoner named Victor Valdez under suspicious circumstances, he created at folk opera sardonically titled "Natural Causes Killed Victor" intended specifically for performance in church sanctuaries. Its premiere performance was in St. Saviour's Church, Bar Harbor, ME, in 2014.

Swanson is survived by a son, Olof Swanson, of New York. His son William died in 2013.

A memorial service is being planned to be held in Maine in July 2020.

Katrina's Dream https://cutt.ly/mrqTmJq 
Natural Causes Killed Victor – The Opera https://cutt.ly/QrqTQrB

Media contact:
Theodore Fletcher
[email protected] 
(207) 244-5225

SOURCE Katrina's Dream