A.S. Haley: Analyzing the Quincy Decision

July 28, 2014

On July 24, 2014 the Illinois Appellate Court for the Fourth District filed its opinion in the appeal taken by the Episcopal Church (USA) from a judgment entered against it by the Hon. Thomas J. Ortbal in September 2013. The three justices on the panel joined in a twenty-page decision that affirmed Judge Ortbal’s judgment in all respects: the (Anglican) Diocese of Quincy properly amended its governing documents so as to secede from ECUSA and cease being a member diocese in 2008; the real and personal property remained with the withdrawing diocesan corporation under Illinois law, and neither was subject to any express or implied trust claims by ECUSA; and ECUSA could not, after the Diocese had completed its vote to withdraw, purport to remove the diocesan trustees or officers and replace them with people from its remnant group that decided to stay with the national Church.

The opinion by the appellate court is a model of clear reasoning, and needs little commentary to be understandable by a lay person. It begins by explaining precisely how the dispute came about, and traces the facts up to the time of the original lawsuit brought by the Anglican Diocese after ECUSA’s attorneys had persuaded the Diocese’s bankers to put a freeze on all of its funds on deposit with them.

Then the opinion summarizes the proceedings leading to, and evidence offered at, the trial before Judge Ortbal in April and May of 2013. The key testimony was mostly received on the question of whether or not ECUSA could be said to be a “hierarchical” church with respect to its member dioceses.

Readers of my posts have known the answer to that question for a long time. ECUSA, the national Church, likes to claim that dioceses do not exist apart from the national Church; but the truth runs the other way: the national Church would be nothing without its member dioceses—and particularly those pre-existing dioceses corresponding to the former Church of England in each of nine former colonies. Representatives from those nine dioceses (referred to at the time not by the word “diocese”, but rather as, e.g., the “Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of Maryland”) met together in Philadelphia and New York over a five-year period beginning in 1785, and eventually agreed to come together in a General Convention (“calling together”) of all of their nine separate churches in a deliberative body that could adopt uniform standards of worship and discipline to be shared among all of them.
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