Monday, March 10, 2014

Heartbreaker: U. S. Supreme Court Denies Falls Church Petition

The order list published this morning by the United States Supreme Court shows that, after relisting the case for its conferences four times, it has denied certiorari (review) in No. 13-449, The Falls Church v. Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, et al. Under its rules, the Court grants certiorari when at least four of the nine justices are interested in a given case; it takes five justices to make a majority.

This was potentially a huge decision for those suffering from years of the courts' misreading of Jones v. Wolf (1979), 443 U.S. 595, as detailed in numerous posts on this blog. The significance is that it would have been the first church property dispute which the Court has accepted for review since Jones -- some 35 years ago. While the decision below (from the Virginia Supreme Court) is not based on ECUSA's Dennis Canon, it nonetheless is grounded in a misreading of how a national Church can unilaterally establish a trust in its favor on all parish property without the parishes themselves declaring the trust in question. Similar bad readings of the dictum in Jones have come from the Supreme Courts of Connecticut, Georgia, New York and California.

It also means that the Diocese of Virginia will now go ahead with its plans for The Falls Church campus. Furthermore, it means that the approximately $3 million that TFC has paid into the Court's registry since April 2012 will now be handed over to the Diocese -- added to the already $10 million worth of real property it received, the Diocese is the beneficiary of a real windfall, if ever there was anything that went by that name.

The Court thus seems willing to live with the disorder and confusion created by its dictum in Jones, at least until its current membership changes. And ECUSA will go on sowing discord and confusion in the State courts.

24 comments:

  1. Not a "heartbreaker," but JUSTICE too long delayed!!! Our long local nightmare is over!

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  2. You are welcome to your brand of "JUSTICE", Frank Stevens, Jr. -- you earned it (and managed to affirm St. Paul in the process). The proof will be in what the Diocese does with it.

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    1. No, I don't think there is need for proof, as what you are reporting/commenting about is a legal process, devoid of doctrinal concerns of the sort you raise. Whatever the diocese does with it, it will be their prerogative.

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    2. No need to be so literal, MacEnroy -- "proof" is meant in the sense of "by their fruits shall you know them."

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    3. Again, this is a legal decision. Can't push your doctrinal judgement into that.

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    4. Then I must conclude that you are not a Christian, MacEnroy. You seek only secular gain. Good luck with that.

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  3. Thanks for covering this case. I will pray that the diocese and Episcopal congregation make wise decisions with the property and further the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the city of Falls Church. God should be praised for blessing the Falls Church Anglican in recent years, growing the parish, youth ministry and planting half a dozen churches in seven years.

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  4. Did you really expect the Diocese to just "mail in the keys". DofV and TEC had a fudicuary duty to defend the property. This is a 200+ year old plant. It was paid for by many folks over the years. Ths idea that the local Anglican Folks paid for the property is silly.

    Ths 57-9 filings were not well thought out and have resulted in a $50million disaster for all nolved.

    In the furure, make sure the Lawyers takeit on a contingent fee basis.

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    1. Don't forget, Lilgrace Roberts, that the 57-9 filings were part of an agreed Protocol that the parishes had worked out with Bishop Lee. The litigation that resulted after the Presiding Bishop ordered Bishop Lee to repudiate the Protocol is her responsibility entirely.

      No, I do not expect Dioceses simply to fold -- as the working out of the Protocol again showed, there are paths that do not have to lead to litigation. But what I ask the Dioceses to do at a minimum is have their parishes record trust deeds in favor of the Diocese, so that there can be no questions in the future. Have you looked at my list of the 90 lawsuits that have all resulted from the Church's failure to take this one simple step?

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    2. Actually, the agreement was never adopted by the Virginia's standing committee. It was presented to the committee, but not accepted or endorsed. See the statement of the Standing Committee in Nov. 2006 http://www.thediocese.net/news/newsView.asp?NewsId=40968173.

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    3. Lilgrace,

      I don't think anyone expected the diocese to "mail in the keys", but I've become so tired of hearing the line "we had a fiduciary duty to sue". A fiduciary duty does not imply that someone needs to take a dog in the manager attitude to hanging on to assets. Rather it implies making sound business decisions and attempting to rationally resolved disputes. Something that, based on the dollars spent to date, doesn't appear to have been done very often in any of these cases. Overarching that, Bishops and Standing Committees also have a Christian responsibility that in my opinion ranks above any fiduciary duty. That duty has been ignored in too many of these law suits.

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    4. Thank you, Joan Gundersen -- according to your link, the Protocol was not repudiated; it simply was not accepted or endorsed at that time, as you state. However, the Standing Committee and Bishop Lee later approved a standstill agreement -- which Bishop Lee then, after talking to "the new sheriff in town" announced he would not renew. The Diocese filed its complaints soon afterward, and ECUSA filed its own, as well. From that point forward, Chancellor Beers steadfastly refused to talk settlement.

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    5. A bit more of intellectual honesty, please?

      Joan never alleged that the protocol was repudiated by the diocese.

      The standstill agreement was limited to 30 days. The bishop was in every right to reject it -or, should we say, not to renew it?

      Again, some intellectual honesty would make your analysis, if not helpful, at least accurate.

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    6. Come on, MacEnroy -- why don't you try reading what I wrote? I said "it was not accepted or endorsed . . . as you state." Neither accepted nor endorsed = not repudiated, either.

      And if we're being intellectually honest, why won't you admit that +Lee followed the PB's instructions in announcing he would not renew the standstill agreement? Did you read her deposition? If you want to make claims here about accuracy, you'll have to do better than that.

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    7. It's a waste of time to guess whether Lee followed the PB instructions or not. Impossible to know. What you can tell for sure is that the standstill agreement was to be renewed after 30 days. That means that the option of 'not renewing', whether by the pressure, terror or error of the PB, or not, was always on the table. Don't understand your scandal.

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    8. A "waste of time" for those who look only for secular gain in this world, perhaps. The "terror or error of the PB" is of no concern to such folk -- but it has real meaning for those who have been personally sued, e.g., for punitive damages simply because they served on a parish vestry.

      I don't think we have anything to discuss in common, MacEnroy. You are a secularist looking at the civil court results; I am a Christian canon lawyer trying to call my fellow Episcopalians to account for their abuses, or support of ECUSA's abuses, of the civil court system for secular gain from their fellow Christians. You don't speak our language, so you might as well have cotton in your ears.

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  5. The Anglican denomination in the United States is the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church---in Virginia, and all 50 States---welcomes ALL to join, or rejoin, in God's Good Time. Pray for reconciliation.

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    1. The Anglican denomination in the United States of America is certainly not the Episcopal Church. Elements of sedition came into the Protestant Episcopal Church after first determining that it would be necessary to cast the Episcopal Church off from its moorings so as to subvert the American Culture and the American Traditionalist social construct.
      The first measures were to move homosexuals into the highest level of adulation and respect while simultaneously taking the most reverential and eloquent expression of the English Language, the Book of Common Prayer....with sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and passages with something appropriate for all times and all places....and they changed it into a stilted, sterile condensed version of liturgical convenience.
      With the ordination of women, and of course lesbians, and with the "search for answers" concerning homosexuality In general....it became obvious, long ago, that the Episcopal Church was to become a place where social change and the destruction of traditional decency was to be the order of the day, week, month, year, and decade until all the old mossbacks were dead and gone and Baal could have his chapel to promote what had once been depravity and perversion and blasphemy.
      I do not judge you, the changers. I judge your actions for my own measure. I know you to be evil and full of your own secular humanist, ethical righteousness. I know that you do not believe in the unseen hocus pocus and little Jew girls having babies without having known man. I know that you regard our believes as childish hope against the probability of black and terminally ending death into nothingness. I know that instead of "And no I lay me down to sleep...etc." you recite to no one, "There are no devils, there are no angels, there is no hell, there is no heaven. There is only before, now, and after. And soon, after becomes before, and others come to live and simply die, as I."

      The Anglican Church will live and there are many congregations that are setting up vibrant ministeries, still cleaving to our Orthodox, Catholic and fundamentalist peculiar mixture. We are the Episcopalians, because we know what the word and concept Bishop means and what considerable human value it has.
      I shall pray for the movement to which you are affixed be led into the blind alley with no exit. That you continue to worship yourselves and your false successes, and that you turn increasingly into yourselves to admire your beauty and superior righteousness in your causes.
      I shan't pray for a reconciliation with the sons of Baal.
      El Gringo Viejo

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  6. From what I can see, TEC is a homosexual activist group that hates everything Christian. The Anglicans are those that represent true Christianity as it can be represented today. Plain and simple. TEC projects itself in absolute activism of the highest democratic order. Anglicans project, and are, Christians from all reality observed.

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  7. Exactly. The surly attitude of the secular humanists, who are hysterically trying to justify their righteousness in this issue when they eschew the concept of righteousness altogether when applied to affairs among people. Destroying institutions is heady stuff, and leaves a hollow pleasure. Restoring men;s souls is heady stuff and leaves a hallowed pleasure.

    We must marvel at the deftness and solidity of thought and meaning of Our Rabbi, as opposed to the smarmy, cocky spiking of the ball of those who think they have won something. Their quest is the material.
    Sooner rather than later, the minority of the Sanhedrin will move their people and their flocks to better synagogues with sinners of our own kind. Our sinners know that they are sinners and prefer to serve their fellow man in love and charity.
    Out sinners are so unimaginative that they actually believe that there are Holy Mysteries and a Peace which passeth all understanding. I choose to be among them, and away from the arrogant. They have have their historic and fine buildings. They will be in ruins because the buildings will lose their souls and pleasant ghosts that make the great Churches homes and not houses.
    I remain with the foot-washers, snake handlers, believers by faith, and the Orthodox who like the tradition and incense and whatever induces comfort in the belief upon the Veritable Word. And I shall continue in the path that has been established by Our Rabbi.

    El Gringo Viejo

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  8. How much more chaotic will things have to become to get SCOTUS's attention?

    One would have thought a state court forcing a large congregation from its church properties and handing the keys over to some distant ecclesiastical politburo (just because it gave itself a "cannon" in 1979) would have been enough to make them figuratively raise their eyebrows, but it clearly isn't...yet.

    So sorry, Falls Church. God be with you.

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  9. PS: The attitudes of some of these 815ers in the comment section, gloating in their own secular self-righteousness, makes me physically sick right now. While I attend a holdout orthodox TEC parish, I loath that I could share communion (if only technically rather than spiritually) with such ravenous appetites for spiritual warfare and destruction. As soon as I can find a tenure-track job and move to an area where there is an orthodox Anglican parish with no ties to 815, I will rejoice and bless God thrice-fold for his goodness to me and my family.

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    1. 10 - 4 . We pray the Holy Ghost in those mysterious ways guide us in the path you describe above.

      El Gringo Viejo

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  10. Allan - the SC Court of Appeals just denied another denominational takeover of church property.

    http://www.judicial.state.sc.us/opinions//unpublishedopinions/HTMLFiles/COA/2014-UP-121.pdf

    Not looking good for TEC in SC.

    Joe

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