A.S. Haley: What They Saw Is Exactly What They Got

Sunday, May 31, 2009

The reign (a word I use advisedly) of ECUSA's current Presiding Bishop has been marked thus far by a some striking characteristics in contrast to anything that ever came before:

1. First and foremost, the number of lawsuits in which the Episcopal Church (USA) is a plaintiff in court against its own---the initiator of litigation against fellow Christians---has multiplied enormously. A summary of cases I gave last August showed there were then eighteen pending suits that had been brought by ECUSA (either as an original plaintiff, or as a subsequent intervenor) in five different states: California (four lawsuits, counting three in Orange County and one in San Joaquin), New York (two lawsuits, one of which settled in September 2007), Virginia (eleven separate lawsuits), Georgia, and Connecticut. Of those, only the three in Orange County had been brought before Katharine Jefferts Schori became Presiding Bishop. Since that post, ECUSA has filed two more lawsuits: one in Pittsbugh and another in Fort Worth, and it was named as a defendant in a preemptive lawsuit brought by the Diocese of Quincy in Illinois, before ECUSA filed suit itself. So under the current Presiding Bishop, ECUSA initiated suit in eighteen separate instances, and there are twenty-two lawsuits for which she now has responsibility. (And that is the case despite the fact, as I pointed out in this post, that the Constitutions and canons nowhere give the president of a body which is not itself a member of the unincorporated association of dioceses authority to bring suit in court "on behalf of" the association as a whole.) the rest