A Virginia court upholds law

Seceding Virginia Parishes Win First Round
John A. Sparks is dean of the Alva J. Calderwood School of Arts & Letters at Grove City College and fellow for educational policy with the Center for Vision & Values.
4/11/2008

GROVE CITY, Pa.--The 12 Virginia Episcopal congregations that voted to leave the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. (ECUSA) and its Virginia Diocese in late 2006 and early 2007 have been successful in the first round of what promises to be a protracted legal battle.
At stake is whether these local parishes can retain their church property, estimated to be worth $30 million to $40 million. When the local churches voted to exit, both the ECUSA and the diocese began lawsuits against the departing churches claiming, among other things, that the local congregants were trespassers in their own sanctuaries.

Now a Virginia judge who is hearing the cases, the Honorable Randy I. Bellows, has issued a carefully worded and tightly reasoned 83-page opinion, which decides a crucial but preliminary issue: Was a Virginia law--which provides a process by which a local church can disaffiliate from its denomination--properly used by the departing churches? Judge Bellows has found, in short, that it was. the rest