New Kensington's Leslie Reimer retiring from 42-year career as Episcopal priest

When the Rev. Leslie Reimer began the journey of her life, it was toward a destination that was, at the time, unreachable for a woman.

After growing up in an Episcopal Church family in New Kensington’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood and graduating from Valley High School in 1970, Reimer went to Dickinson College, imagining herself becoming an English teacher.

“When I graduated from college, I knew I wanted to go to seminary,” she said. But in 1974, “the Episcopal Church was not ordaining women as priests.”

It wasn’t until her senior year at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City in the fall of 1976 that things changed.

“The change was coming. I knew the church approved ordaining women as deacons. I knew that would be possible,” she said. “I believed that it was coming. There were lots of women who believed that. There was reason to be hopeful and optimistic, but it wasn’t guaranteed.”

Reimer was ordained as a deacon in 1977, and has been ordained as a priest since 1980.

Now 70 and living in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, Reimer is retiring as senior associate rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Shadyside, where she has been full time for 24 years. She will deliver her last sermon Sunday.

“I’m very sad to see her retire, but I’m proud of her and proud to have worked with her,” said Calvary’s rector, the Rev. Jonathon Jensen. “Leslie is my colleague but also my very good friend.”

Reimer is choosing to retire two years ahead of the church’s mandatory retirement age for Episcopal clergy of 72.

“I want to be able to be free to enjoy some things while I am healthy,” she said. “I won’t live forever.”

Also weighing on her decision to retire early is having been present through the split in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh in the 2000s largely over issues of sexuality.

Calvary had been a leader on the progressive side of the issue and sought to preserve the Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, Reimer said. Those on the conservative side chose to leave.

That split lead to the demise of her family’s church, St. Andrew’s in New Kensington, whose congregation was among 42 parishes that left the Pittsburgh Episcopal Diocese in 2008 to join the Anglicans.

The Anglican congregation moved out of St. Andrew’s in 2013 and the building sat empty for seven years until it was deconsecrated in January 2020.

That experience, which she called an ugly time, took a toll on Reimer.

“Being at the vortex, it’s tiring and draining,” she said. “We’re well past it now.”

In retirement, Reimer hopes to continue tutoring first graders at Pittsburgh’s Lincoln Elementary School in reading and writing, which had been interrupted by covid.

“I look forward to having the freedom to do more of that,” she said. “It was fun. They were darling little kids.”

She also wants to remain involved with the church’s Sheldon Calvary Camp, a summer camp for children on the Lake Erie shore in Conneaut, Ohio.

“I went there as a child,” she said. “The priest at St. Andrew’s, the Rev. Richard Barnes, encouraged me to go there when I was 12. I would never have found my way there if he had not encouraged me to go.”

Reimer traces her desire to become a priest to both her college years and summers at the camp.

“My life at St. Andrew’s as a kid really shaped and nurtured me in ways that took me straight in that direction,” she said.

After graduating from seminary in 1977, Reimer had a couple of short experiences at St. James Episcopal Church in Penn Hills and Christ Episcopal Church in Indiana, Pa., before she began exploring becoming a hospital chaplain, which led to her spending a year at University of Chicago Hospitals.

“I appreciated the opportunity to be with people when their needs were closer to the surface, which is very different than being with a congregation week after week,” she said. “I was intrigued by the work of the surgeons and the hospital staff.”

In 1984, she joined the pastoral services department at then-Presbyterian University Hospital, today’s UPMC Presbyterian, to provide pastoral care to organ transplant patients there and at Children’s Hospital. She held the position until 1990 when she became overall chaplain at Children’s, staying there until leaving for Calvary in 1998.

Reimer saw the need for spiritual support of transplant patients and their families while serving as a volunteer chaplain at Presby. She created the position of transplant chaplain with a grant from the Episcopal Diocese, which the hospitals continued after the grant ran out.

Today, the hospitals still have chaplains, but none are dedicated exclusively to transplant, spokeswoman Andrea Kunicky said.

In the early 1980s, organ transplantation was new, and Reimer became interested in it. Recipients would often be far from home and in the Pittsburgh area for a year or more between waiting and recovering from very long surgeries.

“It was less ordinary than it is today and more extraordinary,” she said.

Reimer said she took an interfaith approach, and would reach into someone’s own religious traditions and spiritual strength to sustain them through that time.

Her work consisted mostly of listening, she said, “Which is what people need more than anything.”

“It was remarkable to be part of so many people’s stories and get to know all different kinds of folks and see the hope and to see positive outcomes, although not always,” she said. “It also deepened my spirituality and my faith.”

Reimer was the chaplain to a search committee at Calvary looking for a new associate rector with an emphasis on pastoral care when it was suggested she consider the job herself. Taking it would allow her to spend more time at the summer camp, an important consideration in her decision to accept.

It wasn’t easy, as she said being at Children’s was “potentially the best job I could imagine. It was hard to make that decision to leave.”

Jensen, a Kentucky native, came to Calvary as rector eight years ago. He had known of Reimer since 1995 through a shared mentor, the Rev. David Bird, a onetime rector at St. Andrews who went on to serve at the seminary Jensen attended.

Jensen said meeting Reimer felt like finding a long-lost cousin.

“She was brilliant, kind, pastoral, thoughtful, loyal. She is the exact type of priest you would want to work with,” he said. “She brought a gentleness and insight from her own unique Pittsburgh perspective that enabled me to see things I couldn’t otherwise see.”

Reimer had no idea her career in the church would span 45 years.

“I feel like it’s been good and it’s not entirely over,” she said. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to do this. I never imagined how full and rich this life would be.”