US Churches are free to secede, rules judge

Thursday, 17th September 2009
By George Conger

There is nothing in the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church that prevents a diocese from seceding from the national church, a Texas judge declared on Sept 16.

On Wednesday Judge John Chupp of Texas’ 141st District Court handed the Episcopal Church a major setback in its campaign to seize the assets of breakaway dioceses, stating that of the two entities holding themselves out as the “Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth”---Bishop Jack Iker and his diocese affiliated with the Province of the Southern Cone and Bishop Edwin Gulick and his Episcopal Church-affiliated diocese---Bishop Iker’s diocese was the lawful holder of that name, corporate seal and property.

The court’s actions were not a total victory for Bishop Iker, as it did not dismiss as illegitimate the loyalist’s Feb 2009 convention called by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, nor quash their property suit. However, in his comments to the parties Judge Chupp rejected the Episcopal Church’s central legal premise that while people may leave the Episcopal Church, dioceses may not.

The 80 per cent of the delegates who voted to at the 2008 diocesan convention to quit the Episcopal Church for the Province of the Southern Cone “took the diocese with them,” Judge Chupp said. the rest