This post will serve as an introduction to churchgoers both inside and outside the Episcopal Church (USA) who want to know more about the lawsuits it has brought against congregations and entire dioceses who do not want to remain affiliated with it. The easiest way to address this topic is through a Q and A format.
Q Who is suing whom?
A Most often, the plaintiffs bringing the lawsuits are the Episcopal Church itself, together with one of its 100+ dioceses, which are its regional members. When a congregation in one of the dioceses serves notice that it is pulling out of the Church (for various reasons), the Church and that diocese file suit against it for its buildings, bank accounts, hymnals, prayer books, vestments, candlesticks, crosses, vessels and altar cloths. Not only that, but they sue the parish rectors and vestry members as well, and frequently seek punitive damages against them, both as a means of punishment and intimidation, and to make it more costly for them to have to defend themselves in addition to their parish.
Q Why do they sue for those things? Don't they belong to the congregation that paid for them, and that saved the money in its bank account?
A On paper, all those things are in the congregation's name, yes, because (almost always) the congregation has paid for them, and neither the Church nor the diocese has paid a thing. But the Church and the Diocese claim that all the congregation's assets are held in trust, and cannot be used outside of the Church. So when the congregation votes to leave, the diocese says: "Fine, but leave us your keys, your deeds, and your bank accounts."
Q Did the congregation know about that trust?
A Most often not, until just before the lawsuit is filed. That's because it was created by passing a Canon (bylaw) at the Church's national convention in 1979, and then neither the Church nor the dioceses told their congregations about it. Even one of the Church's bishops admitted recently in a lawsuit that "no one expects church members to know much about the Canons."
Q How can the Church enforce a trust that no one knew about?
A Because many courts are allowing them to. They say to the congregation: "When you joined the Church, you agreed to abide by all of its canons."
Q But did congregations joining the Church in the 1800's agree to abide by a Canon passed in 1979, if they weren't told about it?
A The courts say it doesn't matter. The congregations were supposedly "represented" at the national convention that adopts the Canons, whether they actually knew about them or not.
Q Even if a congregation knew about the 1979 Canon, how can a Church simply declare that a trust exists on all of its parishes' properties, just like that? Wouldn't each congregation have to sign a deed placing its property into such a trust, for it to be recognized in court?
A Again, that's they way everyone else has to create a trust, yes -- the owner of the property in question has to sign a document in writing that places the property into a trust.
Q So how do the courts let the Episcopal Church get away without having the signed consent of each of its congregations?
A Because it's a big national church, and claims it has the power over each of its congregations to do so. And the courts don't like to ask too many questions about the structure and power arrangements of a church, for fear of interfering with the "free exercise" of its religion, under the First Amendment.
Q Has the Church succeeded in each of its lawsuits to date?
A By no means. Its arguments have been successful to date in about nine states, and have been unsuccessful thus far in about eight others. Final decisions are still pending in other states. Each State decides the cases according to its own law of trusts, and those differ widely.
Q Will the differing results ever get resolved?
A The United States Supreme Court could help, by making it clear that an earlier decision was not intended to grant national churches a special privilege to bypass State trust laws.
Q Is there any chance of its doing so?
A There are three cases now pending before it asking it to do just that. We will probably not know whether it will agree to hear them before June, or possibly not even until next October.
Q How much is all this litigation costing?
A I estimate about $25 million to date -- there is nothing so expensive as litigating over 75 lawsuits, some of them through several appeals. You can read how I arrive at that estimate here.
Q What are the Church and its dioceses doing with the properties they win in their lawsuits?
A Most of the time they have no remaining congregations sufficient to occupy them and pay for their upkeep and the costs of operation, including the salaries. Very few of the properties -- less than half a dozen or so -- are now in the hands of Episcopal congregations who actually use them each week.
Q So what can the diocese do with a property for which there is no congregation?
A It tries to sell it -- and if it does so, it is usually for a loss (in the current market). It uses the money to defray the costs of litigation.
Q Could the congregation that lost purchase it from the diocese?
A The leadership of the Episcopal Church strongly discourages that, and practically all of the dioceses have refused to sell, to what they regard as "the schismatics", i.e., "the competition."
Q How does that make sense?
A It doesn't. Frankly, it's madness. Despite their protestations, the leaders of the Church have not managed to preserve any assets "for future generations", and they have consumed far more of the Church's endowment on lawsuits than they will ever replace through sales of property.
Q So why does the litigation continue?
A Solely as a means of intimidation against those who are thinking of leaving, and as a punishment of those who left. And it will continue until the Episcopal Church itself either depletes its own available assets, or until those in its pews and pulpits bring the leaders to their senses.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Pope Benedict in Cuba: No Fatherland without Virtue
Margarita Mooney is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Faculty Fellow in the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina. She has written for Mere Comments, the blog for Touchstone Magazine, an outstanding commentary on the significance of the Pope's visit last week to Cuba. Here is how her piece begins:
Note: for additional perspective on the Pope's remarks delivered in Cuba, see this article as well, and the longer story in the Miami Herald, which is at this link.
Perhaps by now you have seen some of the images of two ideological opposites, Pope Benedict XVI and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who met for 30 minutes at the end of the Pope’s visit to Cuba in March. If you don’t know the history of Cuban communism or the main themes of Benedict’s writings on liberty, reason and truth, you may have missed the significance of his words to the Cuban people. For example, Benedict’s profound statement “No hay patria sin virtud (“there is no authentic fatherland without virtue”) seemed to be a play on the Cuban slogan “patria o muerte” (fatherland or death). As I’ve written before about the contradictions of Cuban communism, there is nothing virtuous in denying people liberty in order to achieve a real or supposed collective well being. As a college student with great interest in development in Latin America, I made my first trip to Cuba (my mother’s homeland) in 1994. From 1994-2006, I traveled to Cuba 7 times. (In case you are wondering, although traveling to Cuba for tourism or business is prohibited, travel for Cuban-Americans like myself to the island is not prohibited by US law). During my many trips, I became close friends with a group of young Cubans in Santiago who are very active in the Catholic Church. This March, the Pope first visited Santiago. One friend in Santiago, an active Catholic and a member of the political group Christian Liberation Movement, who I will call Rodrigo, wrote to me,As the Canon Theologian of the Diocese of South Carolina is wont to say, be sure to follow the links and read the whole thing. There is no substitute for informed reporting that comes from personal knowledge and contacts.
I’m exhausted but seeing the Pope has renewed my spirit. I was at the Mass and at his pilgrimage to Our Lady of Charity. His words words of hope echoed with the heart of all Cubans. It’s hard to express what is is like to have him so near; you can see goodness and purity incarnate in a human being.Watching Pope Benedict celebrate Mass on Wednesday, March 28th, 2012, I was struck by several themes in his homily, all themes of his extensive writings, but which take on particular significance in Cuba. Those themes are: trust in God, truth, reason, religious freedom, and reconciliation. The text of the homily can be read in Spanish or English on the Vatican’s website, and if you speak Spanish, I strongly encourage you to listen to the Vatican’s video recording of the homily to hear how Benedict emphasizes words like authentic liberty and the innate desire to search for truth.
Note: for additional perspective on the Pope's remarks delivered in Cuba, see this article as well, and the longer story in the Miami Herald, which is at this link.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Presiding Bishop's Statement on the Second Coming
Scene: a time in the not-too-distant future. A non-descript office, with some books, and small table with a kneeler in front of it and an emblem above it. The emblem consists of a combination earth/peace sign flanked by two doves in profile, and is illuminated by two crossed laser beams coming from below. There is another table nearby, with a transprojector on it.
The machine beeps, and the following message begins to scroll on a large overhead screen. No one is present to read it.
[ENS (April 1). From an undisclosed location. Transcript of remarks by the Presiding Bishop.]
As Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, I feel an obligation to address the rumors, which are rampant in these troubled times, that the "end times" are beginning, and that the so-called "Second Coming" is at hand.
We of course are all aware that every prophecy that has been made to date about "the end of the world" has proved to be untrue. After all, we are still here to make that statement, and so I say it again, with no little confidence: every prophecy to date has been false.
What is so special, then, about the latest one? Nothing, that I can see -- because it is not specific, and it is not the utterance of just one person. It is, as I say, nothing more than rumors and vague whispers.
Are we having earthquakes? Yes, we are -- the latest one on the Atlantic seaboard, as you know, eliminated The Episcopal Church's last main source of income, our rentals from our former headquarters at 815 Second Avenue, when the ensuing tsunami flooded all of lower Manhattan to a depth of a hundred or more feet.
Fortunately, as you know, I and my staff of two (plus my part-time secretary) had relocated to Oklahoma a good four months ago, where the rents are much cheaper. Also, as my COO informs me (she is one of the two; the other is my canon treasurer), the building was insured, and our lawyers right now are reviewing the policy to see just what is covered and what is excluded.
But there have always been earthquakes, so that is nothing new. Are we having wars? Of course -- mankind has always had wars, and these times are no exception.
Had Israel simply followed the repeated recommendations of our General Convention, dropped its blockade of Gaza, pulled out of Jerusalem and withdrawn to its 1967 borders, it is safe to say that nuclear war would never have broken out in the Middle East. But Israel did not follow those recommendations, and so now we have the unfortunate situation we have there.
But I am happy to say that our Standing Commission on Social Justice and Public Policy is meeting right now with the Standing Commission on International Peace with Justice Concerns, and they should have some new recommendations for living into the horrendous events going on there as I speak. The only problem is that, even though there are only two of them able to meet, events appear to be moving faster than those two can agree on what to recommend.
People in our Church are complaining, too, about the mandatory chip implants we introduced a while ago in order to make the tallying of Average Weekly Attendance so much easier on our stressed-out and overworked clergy. Some are calling them the "mark of the beast."
I am here to tell you that there is absolutely no basis for such talk. The three sixes that you see when you first take one out of its little box, before implanting it as per the safe and easy directions, are actually three nines, because that is the way they come from the manufacturer. Those nines are automatically advanced to zeros the first time the chip is activated, so that it can begin to record thereafter the number of times each parishioner thinks of going to church, starting with "001", and so on.
I am assured that the chips could not have been manufactured any other way and do their intended job. Also, having four digits rather than three would have been too expensive -- they tell me we can still keep track every time they roll over.
And please remember -- we were one of the last churches to adopt the chips. We did so only when the government told us it would cut off our funding if we could not provide a more reliable count of our weekly attendance, such as it is, as measured by our intentions. I'm sure I don't have to remind you of our official motto: "It's the thought that counts."
All the churches, and all those atheist and agnostic gatherings that so outnumber us, are using the chips to provide the government with the data it needs to disburse the money it appropriates. With the loss of all our rental income, it now becomes more important than ever to maintain a steady cash flow, and the chips are the only means of doing that.
As far as persecutions of Christians are concerned, I want to stress the fact that there are no persecutions of Christians who are members of the officially recognized Christian churches, such as The Episcopal Church.
The persecutions that are going on are all persecutions of Anglicans -- and as we all know by now, Anglicans are not Christians. They ceased being that when we expelled the last of them from our Church some ten years ago, for abandonment of communion.
It is not our fault that they have not chosen to tithe to our government, in exchange for the bounties it gives us -- they could do so, and I am told the persecutions would stop. But they are stubborn, and insist on "witnessing" to the one they call "the Way, the Truth and the Life."
As we who are the official, enlightened Christians know by now, every religion recognized by the government has the privilege of choosing their own messiah. That is why some have the Budda Christ, others have the Zoroastrian Christ, and so forth, and why we have our own personal messiah, which we call simply "the Force Within."
Anglicans, and the religion they profess to follow, simply do not allow enough room for the largeness and variety of the human spirit. And also, they still require the barbarism of what they call "baptism" before you can be invited to share what they arcanely refer to as their "sacraments." Though I consider myself broad-minded, I could never ask anyone to try to live into that.
Finally, I want to say something about our country's most wonderful and magnanimous President-for-Life. Unfortunately, some people are risking the full wrath of the law by referring to herhim -- in secret, of course; they wouldn't dare risk it in public -- as the "A. C." (You know what I mean, because we are forbidden to use the words those initials represent.) All the things that are said about herhim -- about herhis ambition to rule the world, about herhis having miraculously recovered from some unspecified wound, and so forth, are simply not true. Why, I had breakfast with herhim just the other day, and s/he was perfectly normal and gracious with me. In fact, I will tell you what s/he told me -- s/he said:
* * *
[At this point, the transcript of the Presiding Bishop's talk was interrupted, presumably by the exigencies of the ongoing war, which has spread from the Middle East. ENS is working on recovering the connection, and will have a further announcement just as soon as it can be reestablished.]
The machine beeps, and the following message begins to scroll on a large overhead screen. No one is present to read it.
[ENS (April 1). From an undisclosed location. Transcript of remarks by the Presiding Bishop.]
As Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, I feel an obligation to address the rumors, which are rampant in these troubled times, that the "end times" are beginning, and that the so-called "Second Coming" is at hand.
We of course are all aware that every prophecy that has been made to date about "the end of the world" has proved to be untrue. After all, we are still here to make that statement, and so I say it again, with no little confidence: every prophecy to date has been false.
What is so special, then, about the latest one? Nothing, that I can see -- because it is not specific, and it is not the utterance of just one person. It is, as I say, nothing more than rumors and vague whispers.
Are we having earthquakes? Yes, we are -- the latest one on the Atlantic seaboard, as you know, eliminated The Episcopal Church's last main source of income, our rentals from our former headquarters at 815 Second Avenue, when the ensuing tsunami flooded all of lower Manhattan to a depth of a hundred or more feet.
Fortunately, as you know, I and my staff of two (plus my part-time secretary) had relocated to Oklahoma a good four months ago, where the rents are much cheaper. Also, as my COO informs me (she is one of the two; the other is my canon treasurer), the building was insured, and our lawyers right now are reviewing the policy to see just what is covered and what is excluded.
But there have always been earthquakes, so that is nothing new. Are we having wars? Of course -- mankind has always had wars, and these times are no exception.
Had Israel simply followed the repeated recommendations of our General Convention, dropped its blockade of Gaza, pulled out of Jerusalem and withdrawn to its 1967 borders, it is safe to say that nuclear war would never have broken out in the Middle East. But Israel did not follow those recommendations, and so now we have the unfortunate situation we have there.
But I am happy to say that our Standing Commission on Social Justice and Public Policy is meeting right now with the Standing Commission on International Peace with Justice Concerns, and they should have some new recommendations for living into the horrendous events going on there as I speak. The only problem is that, even though there are only two of them able to meet, events appear to be moving faster than those two can agree on what to recommend.
People in our Church are complaining, too, about the mandatory chip implants we introduced a while ago in order to make the tallying of Average Weekly Attendance so much easier on our stressed-out and overworked clergy. Some are calling them the "mark of the beast."
I am here to tell you that there is absolutely no basis for such talk. The three sixes that you see when you first take one out of its little box, before implanting it as per the safe and easy directions, are actually three nines, because that is the way they come from the manufacturer. Those nines are automatically advanced to zeros the first time the chip is activated, so that it can begin to record thereafter the number of times each parishioner thinks of going to church, starting with "001", and so on.
I am assured that the chips could not have been manufactured any other way and do their intended job. Also, having four digits rather than three would have been too expensive -- they tell me we can still keep track every time they roll over.
And please remember -- we were one of the last churches to adopt the chips. We did so only when the government told us it would cut off our funding if we could not provide a more reliable count of our weekly attendance, such as it is, as measured by our intentions. I'm sure I don't have to remind you of our official motto: "It's the thought that counts."
All the churches, and all those atheist and agnostic gatherings that so outnumber us, are using the chips to provide the government with the data it needs to disburse the money it appropriates. With the loss of all our rental income, it now becomes more important than ever to maintain a steady cash flow, and the chips are the only means of doing that.
As far as persecutions of Christians are concerned, I want to stress the fact that there are no persecutions of Christians who are members of the officially recognized Christian churches, such as The Episcopal Church.
The persecutions that are going on are all persecutions of Anglicans -- and as we all know by now, Anglicans are not Christians. They ceased being that when we expelled the last of them from our Church some ten years ago, for abandonment of communion.
It is not our fault that they have not chosen to tithe to our government, in exchange for the bounties it gives us -- they could do so, and I am told the persecutions would stop. But they are stubborn, and insist on "witnessing" to the one they call "the Way, the Truth and the Life."
As we who are the official, enlightened Christians know by now, every religion recognized by the government has the privilege of choosing their own messiah. That is why some have the Budda Christ, others have the Zoroastrian Christ, and so forth, and why we have our own personal messiah, which we call simply "the Force Within."
Anglicans, and the religion they profess to follow, simply do not allow enough room for the largeness and variety of the human spirit. And also, they still require the barbarism of what they call "baptism" before you can be invited to share what they arcanely refer to as their "sacraments." Though I consider myself broad-minded, I could never ask anyone to try to live into that.
Finally, I want to say something about our country's most wonderful and magnanimous President-for-Life. Unfortunately, some people are risking the full wrath of the law by referring to herhim -- in secret, of course; they wouldn't dare risk it in public -- as the "A. C." (You know what I mean, because we are forbidden to use the words those initials represent.) All the things that are said about herhim -- about herhis ambition to rule the world, about herhis having miraculously recovered from some unspecified wound, and so forth, are simply not true. Why, I had breakfast with herhim just the other day, and s/he was perfectly normal and gracious with me. In fact, I will tell you what s/he told me -- s/he said:
* * *
[At this point, the transcript of the Presiding Bishop's talk was interrupted, presumably by the exigencies of the ongoing war, which has spread from the Middle East. ENS is working on recovering the connection, and will have a further announcement just as soon as it can be reestablished.]
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