A.S. Haley: Constitutional Crisis in ECUSA (Pt. V): The Dennis Canon

December 11, 2010

Excerpt:
You will search ECUSA's earliest and current Constitutions in vain for any delegation of authority to dictate how Church property is to be held, purchased, encumbered, or sold. (When the first Canon on that topic was adopted in 1868 -- the predecessor to current Canon I.7.3 -- it provided, as it always has since, that the sale or encumbrance of parish property required the approval of the ecclesiastical authority in the diocese, subject to such exceptions as the diocese might provide. The Canon thus was not an exercise of a national delegated power at all, but instead a recognition, or declaration, of where such power lay: with the individual dioceses.)

The problem is that ECUSA itself has no court or other body with the power to interpret its Constitution, or to declare a canon "unconstitutional". For that reason, an unconstitutional Canon unfortunately has been found enforceable, and enforced, in secular courts -- and that only because the secular courts are barred by the First Amendment from entertaining questions about the ecclesiastical constitutionality of Church legislation. (Indeed, I have contemplated recommending to my fellow chancellors that the next suit brought by a bishop to enforce the Dennis Canon be met with this objection, based on the words of Canon IV.14.2: "No Member of the Clergy of this Church may resort to the secular courts for the purpose of interpreting the Constitution and Canons, or for the purpose of resolving any dispute arising thereunder . . .". Someone also ought to bring a presentment against the bishop for violating the Canon.)

So the Church is, in the end, whatever it says it is -- which is exactly how God intended it to be. If a Church wishes to pursue all manner of ungodly goals and purposes, that is the kind of church it will be. We are witnessing today the spectacle of a Church tearing itself apart for the sake of unconstitutional power being asserted by those in a position to do so. Few are trying to check the powers so asserted; most are going along with the flow, like blind sheep. the rest image