A.S. Haley: 815's Day of Reckoning Approaches

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

The Episcopal Church (USA) currently is a party to some sixty lawsuits across the United States. Its litigation budget from 2006-2012 could approach $7 million, or more than $1 million per year -- and that is according to just the official, published figures. There is another considerable amount going out to prop up its Potemkin dioceses in San Joaquin, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh and Quincy.

Those are the four dioceses which have thus far voted to leave the Church, and each departure has spawned a lawsuit. ECUSA from the beginning has adopted a high-stakes, winner-take-all strategy which depends for its success on its ability to prove in court the proposition that a diocese is not free to withdraw from the voluntary unincorporated association which ECUSA has been since its formation at common law in 1789.

By contending that its dioceses may not withdraw, ECUSA maintains the fiction that its Potemkin creations -- clergy and laity hobbled together into a hastily, but illegally, called "special convention" and programmed to vote for a new "standing committee" and (perhaps) a provisional bishop -- are the real continuing diocesan entities in the eyes of the law. The people voting earlier to amend the diocesan Constitutions acted beyond their lawful powers, the argument goes. The lay deputies to the diocesan Conventions are thereby supposed to have violated Canon I.17.8, which reads:

Any person accepting any office in this Church shall well and faithfully perform the duties of that office in accordance with the Constitution and Canons of this Church and of the Diocese in which the office is being exercised. the rest