A.S. Haley: Non-Diocese Systematically Suing "Former" Parishes

Saturday, March 6, 2010

In the geographical area of the one, true, and only Diocese of San Joaquin in the Anglican Communion, we have an anomaly. There is another group that also claims to be a "diocese" in the Anglican Communion, and specifically within the Episcopal Church (USA). Both ECUSA's Presiding Bishop and the President of its House of Deputies have connived together with the resigned former diocesan of Northern California, the Rt. Rev. Jerry A. Lamb, to bring this result about. No General Convention of ECUSA, however, has ever gone through the steps required to admit this second "diocese" into union with it, and that is why I call it a non-Diocese. That is also why I say that there is only one true Diocese of San Joaquin -- which is now affiliated both with ACNA and with the Anglican Communion through the Province of the Southern Cone. (Once the Global South members of the Anglican Communion act to recognize ACNA, there will no longer be any need for the affiliation with the Southern Cone. And such recognition will occur soon, spurred on by the impending confirmation of yet one more same-sex partnered individual to the episcopate in ECUSA.)

Bishop Lamb, Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori, and President Anderson are all pretending as though ECUSA's former Diocese of San Joaquin never left it to realign with the Southern Cone and ACNA. However, they really have nothing to say about it, because the departure of that Diocese from ECUSA raised only questions of California corporate law. There was no Canon or Constitutional provision of ECUSA which placed any restriction on the power of the Diocese to amend its own Constitution, and no limit on that power within the Diocesan Constitution itself. The Diocesan Convention, in two annual meetings called pursuant to the Constitution, at which a quorum was present and the required supermajorities voted, adopted measures which made it no longer possible for that Diocese to be a member of ECUSA, since the language reciting that the Diocese "acceded" to ECUSA's Constitution was deleted. the rest