"Inclusive" ECUSA: "Love Never Ends" -- but +Love Must Go

In a theological dispute that ECUSA's Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has now personally allowed to become a travesty, the Episcopal Church in the USA (what I call "ECUSA", because it is a spawn of today's secular United States, and as such is not qualified to assume the broader mantle of "TEC", or "The Episcopal Church"), held a formal hearing whose object was to remove the Rt. Rev. William H. Love, Bishop of Albany, from the post to which his diocese long ago elected him. 

His sin (sc. offense against the authorities) that requires his deposition? It was his faithfulness to the "doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal Church (USA)" -- exactly as he vowed when he took Episcopal orders, and again when he was consecrated one of that organization's bishops.

Bishop Love took God at His word when He decreed in Gen. 2:24 that "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." In today's PC terminology, he denied to same-sex couples their humanly implied right to have their unions receive God's sanction and blessing in the churches of his Diocese. But the 2018 General Convention passed a Resolution (see below) purporting to make the availability of an "alternate rite" for same-sex couples mandatory in all dioceses. And Bishop Love has steadfastly refused to allow any such rite to be celebrated in any of his parishes.

For such an unforgivable trespass upon General Convention's claimed divine prerogatives, Bishop Love must now depart his post, according to  that apostate group's current leadership.

To my regular readers: please forgive the barely concealed disgust in those lead-in paragraphs. Your Curmudgeon cannot refrain from it, when it comes to describing the apostasies of the church in which he was raised from birth, and from which its leadership, by those same apostasies, has now forever alienated him. As I have documented abundantly on this site, that leadership continually abuses its ($350 million worth of swaggering) power. Your Curmudgeon was trained always to speak the truth to power. If that truth be seen in some circles as contempt for "ECUSA's leadership" (an oxymoron in itself), then so be it -- let the shoe fit him who wears it.

The (in)validity of the charges brought against Bishop Love turns first upon the status of Resolution B012 passed (after many amendments from the floor, which you may trace at the link) at ECUSA's 2018 General Convention. That Resolution states at its outset (with my bold emphasis added):

Resolved, That the 79th General Convention authorize for trial use, in accordance with Article X of the Constitution and Canon II.3.6, “The Blessing of a Civil Marriage 2” and “An Order for Marriage 2” (as appended to the report of the Task Force for the Study of Marriage to the 79th General Convention), beginning the first Sunday of Advent, 2018 . . . 

The two liturgies referenced in the Resolution purport to be ceremonies joining or blessing the union of two persons of the same gender in what they each call a "marriage" now recognized ecclesiastically by General Convention, but not by ECUSA's standard Book of Common Prayer (1979 revision). It was the adoption of their predecessors in the 2015 General Convention that proved to be the final straw that compelled your Curmudgeon to quit his theretofore lifelong membership in ECUSA -- because of the ceremonies' reliance on outright blasphemy against Christ and His Church (as explained in this earlier post).  When ECUSA's assembled bishops blessed ritual blasphemy, it was time for faithful Christians to depart from their company.

Way back in 2012, when General Convention was beginning to consider proposals to provide trial services for the ecclesiastical union of two men or two women (I refuse to use the term "marriage" to describe such things, because it would be a category mistake), I put up a series of carefully researched articles that demonstrated why General Convention lacked the legislative power to do any such thing, without first proposing to amend the Book of Common Prayer. (See Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here, and Part V here.)

The reason for its inability is that both the Constitution (Art. X) and the Canons (Canon II.3.1) make the BCP mandatory and normative for all forms of worship in the Episcopal Church (USA). And General Convention -- to repeat myself -- has not altered the marriage liturgy or rubrics in the BCP, both of which specify that Episcopal marriage is the union of a man and a woman in Holy Matrimony.

Let's try an analogy or two here in order to understand the magnitude of the problem facing Bishop Love's Hearing Panel at this point. Suppose General Convention enacted a resolution that purported to authorize, "for trial use, in accordance with Article X of the Constitution and Canon II.3.6" (exactly as it did in the case of 2018 Res. B012), a liturgy for Holy Eucharist to be celebrated by a lay (i.e., non-ordained) person (which it called a "President"). Would the bare reference to its authority under Art. X and Canon II.3.6 suffice to make the measure constitutional, or even canonical (which at bottom has to be the same thing, because the Constitution limits what GC may enact as Canons)?

Or again, suppose General Convention passed with the same references a resolution authorizing the substitution of readings from the Muslim Qur'an in place of those from Holy Scriptures. (I am deliberately choosing from among examples within our lifetime in order to avoid any charge of fantastical fabrication.)

Could either such a measure be upheld as canonical -- i.e., within the competency and powers of General Convention as spelled out in ECUSA's Constitution and Canons?  No? Well, why not?

Because in both instances, the proposed "alternatives" would violate the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer.  Those rubrics bar anyone but a duly ordained priest or bishop from officiating at Holy Eucharist, and prescribe given readings from the Old and New Testaments for each Sunday in the calendar. If General Convention could change the liturgies of the BCP by passage of a single resolution at any one session, then the rites of the BCP would cease to be the constitutionally mandated forms of Sunday worship, and Article X of ECUSA's Constitution would lose all of its force and meaning.

And that is why Article X of ECUSA's Constitution requires that all proposed revisions or additions to the BCP pass a first reading in both Houses at a given General Convention, followed by a formal transmittal of them to the individual dioceses for deliberation in their respective annual conventions, following a passage (by carefully specified majorities) on second reading in each House at the next succeeding General Convention. (For the qualifying details, see my posts on amending / revising the BCP as linked above.)

For reasons of expedience, the backers of 2018 Res. B012 chose to deny that they were proposing any addition or alteration to the Book of Common Prayer.  But their proposed "alternative to the rite of marriage in the BCP" does just that, and is contrary to its explicit rubrics concerning marriage, as any reader of English may plainly ascertain for himself.  So where does that leave Resolution 2018-B012?

Its supporters next fall back upon the change they made to Canon I.18 in 2015, purporting to change its definition of marriage (then matching the BCP's rubrics) to one expansive enough to embrace same-sex unions under the "Church's umbrella."

To pretend to change the language of the marriage canon, however, is meaningless if one does not change the rites and rubrics in the Book of Common Prayer -- which requires, as I remind the reader, two successive General Conventions for its accomplishment.

Admittedly, the Church's Canons may be changed by resolution duly adopted in just a single session of General Convention -- but not (according to Article X) the Book of Common Prayer!

Precisely because it takes a longer process to amend ECUSA's Constitution and BCP than it does to amend its Canons, canon law authorities have uniformly held that the former two documents take precedence over the latter in the case of any conflict. As it states in the last two paragraphs on the last page (p. 482) of Volume I of White & Dykman, Annotated Constitution and Canons (viewable / downloadable at this link), which is every canon lawyer's bible, in regard to a similar attempt to amend Canon I.7 in 1979:

The 1979 Amendment to Canon 7 is now inconsistent with the authority granted by the rubrics of the rite for the Dedication and Consecration of a Church which is part of the 1979 Prayer Book.

The authority granted in the Prayer Book would take precedence over the provisions added to Canon II. 7 at the 1979 General Convention.

So those members of General Convention who fancifully imagine they solved the problem by their purported 2015 "amendment" to Canon I.18 delude themselves -- from a constitutional standpoint.  And if an organization will not respect the terms of its own duly adopted and agreed Constitution, then what is the point of organizing under it in the first place?

From what has been logically demonstrated above, the conclusion logically follows: the prosecution of Bishop Love is neither canonical nor constitutional.  It is brought upon baseless charges that have no backing under ECUSA's Constitution and Canons properly adopted thereunder -- which, for the reasons stated, do not include the current version of Canon I.18.

The disgrace that should fall upon those in ECUSA who are pressing the charges against Bishop Love is made manifest by these other incontestable facts:

1. The same General Convention that passed Resolution 2018-B012, under which Bishop Love is being prosecuted, also passed Resolution 2018-D078, which had language showing that it was expressly intended as a change to a specific part of the BCP, as authorized by Art. X, section b of the Constitution --- so General Convention knew perfectly well how to signal when it was using its authority under Article X to amend the BCP (quoted with my bold emphasis added):

Resolved, That the 79th General Convention authorize The Holy Eucharist: Rite II, including Eucharistic Prayers A, B, and D, (Expansive Language) for trial use throughout this church as a proposed revision within pages 355-382 of the Book of Common Prayer pursuant to Article X(b) of the Constitution;

2. Not only that, but the same General Convention showed that it was fully aware of the Constitutional defects in its previous adoption of church-wide "trial rites" intended to supplement, and not amend, the Book of Common Prayer. (As mentioned, my 2012 series of posts linked above went into those defects in depth.) With Resolution 2018-A063, the Convention passed on first reading a proposed amendment that would grant the following specific authority to the power of a single session acting with the appropriate majorities under Article X of the Constitution, by adding a new subsection (c):

(c) Authorize for use throughout this Church, as provided by Canon, alternative and additional liturgies to supplement those provided in the Book of Common Prayer.

(Emphasis added.) This amendment will not become effective, however, until it passes on a second reading at GC 2021 next year. So it cannot save the illegitimacy of Resolution 2018-B012, and it cannot rescue the prosecution of Bishop Love from its illegality, as well. To the contrary -- by passing the proposed Amendment to Article X, General Convention 2018 in effect conceded that it lacked all authority to propose any supplements to the BCP for mandatory use throughout the church without observing the formalities that Article X requires.

3. But this third and final fact is truly stunning: the Rt. Rev. Nicholas Knisely, Bishop of Rhode Island, who is the Chairperson of Bishop Love's disciplinary Hearing Panel, was also one of the proponents of Resolution 2018-B012 -- the very Resolution whose applicability to him Bishop Love is challenging! Why has no one to date noticed the inherent conflict of interest in Bishop Knisely's appointment to the Hearing Panel?

It is all very complex and interrelated, I know. But I hope I have been clear enough in laying the matter out to show what the chief difficulty is with attempting to try (and convict!) Bishop Love for violating "the discipline and worship" of the Episcopal Church (USA):

As specified in Canon IV.2, "Discipline of the Church shall be found in the Constitution, the Canons and the Rubrics and the Ordinal of the Book of Common Prayer" (italics added). The "worship" of the Church is not specially defined in the canons, but how could it not consist of what is in the Book of Common Prayer?

The current Rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer repeatedly provide, as they did when Bishop Love was ordained and consecrated, that a celebration of marriage in the Church is only between a man and a woman, and not between two of any other kinds of persons (see the BCP online here, beginning on page 423).

The rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer, as we have seen, take precedence over any canon in the case of a conflict, and the rites in the Book of Common Prayer spell out the mandatory forms of the Church's worship.

Therefore, it is impossible that, by adhering as he does to the text of the Book of Common Prayer (which does nothing other than incorporate God's words in Gen. 2:24, as also quoted by Jesus in Mt 19:5), Bishop Love can be said to violate either his vows given upon ordination, or the discipline, or the worship of the Episcopal Church (USA).

 

Texas Supreme Court Repudiates ECUSA's Sophistries

In a comprehensive and unanimous thirty-page decision filed Friday morning, May 22, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bishop Jack L. Iker and reversed the Court of Appeals' earlier decision to the effect that ECUSA's rump diocese, and not Bishop Iker's diocese, controlled the Texas corporation which holds title to the properties of those parishes which in 2008 voted to withdraw their diocese from the unaffiliated and unincorporated association that historically has been called the (Protestant) Episcopal Church in the United States of America.

The decision is as straightforward an application of "neutral principles of law" (espoused by the U.S. Supreme Court in Jones v. Wolf) as one could find among the courts to which ECUSA has presented its "hierarchical church" sophistries. It repudiates those sophistries in a succinct passage (pp. 24-25):

In sum, TEC’s determinations as to which faction is the true diocese loyal to the church and which congregants are in good standing are ecclesiastical determinations to which the courts must defer. But applying neutral principles to the organizational documents, the question of property ownership is not entwined with or settled by those determinations. The Fort Worth Diocese’s identity depends on what its documents say. To that end, the Diocesan Constitution and Canons provided who could make amendments and under what circumstances; none of those circumstances incorporate or rely on an ecclesiastical determination by the national church; and nothing in the diocese’s or national church’s documents precluded amendments rescinding an accession to or affiliation with TEC. Applying neutral principles of law, we hold that the majority faction is the Fort Worth Diocese and parishes and missions in union with that faction hold equitable title to the disputed property under the Diocesan Trust. 

The opinion then makes short shrift of ECUSA's remaining arguments. It demolishes ECUSA's Dennis Canon, first by holding that a beneficiary like ECUSA cannot declare a trust in its favor in Texas on property that it does not own, and second by holding that even if the Dennis Canon could be said to create a trust in ECUSA's favor, the Canon does not, as Texas law specifies, make the trust "expressly irrevocable". Thus it was well within the power of Bishop Iker's Fort Worth Diocese to revoke any such trust, which it did by a diocesan canon adopted in 1989 -- to which ECUSA never objected in the twenty years following that act.

The Texas Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeals' holding that ECUSA could not assert title to the parishes' properties by way of any "constructive" trust (a creation of the law to prevent a wrongdoer's "unjust enrichment"), or by the ancient doctrines of estoppel or trespass-to-try-title, or by accusing Bishop Iker and his fellow trustees of the diocesan corporation of breaches of fiduciary obligation allegedly owed to ECUSA. Each of those claims would involve the civil courts unconstitutionally in disputes over religious doctrine.

In conclusion, the Court affirmed the judgment of the Court of Appeals on the grounds last noted, reversed its principal holding that as an ecclesiastical matter, ECUSA got to say which corporation under Texas civil law was the entity which held the parishes' property in trust, and reinstated the trial court's judgment that Bishop Iker's corporation was in law the trustee of the properties of the parishes in his diocese.

Where does the matter go from here? First of all, back to the trial court, whose judgment (now made final by the Texas Supreme Court) "permanently enjoined [ECUSA]'s clergy and leaders from acting as "The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth" (opinion, p. 11).  That injunction may now be enforced, and so ECUSA and its rump diocese will have to come up with a different name.

(That is one of the downsides of a litigation strategy pursuant to which you pretend to be the "true" diocese that continued in the place of the one that withdrew. You argue that the vote to withdraw was "illegal" under ECUSA's Constitution and Canons, which in fact are silent on that subject [see the Court's opinion, p. 23], and so conclude that it is the withdrawing entity that has to find a new name. It is a game with all-or-nothing stakes. Now ECUSA and its followers in Fort Worth have played it and lost.)

Also facing a required change will be the ECUSA-aligned parish of All Saints in Fort Worth, which  thanks to the graciousness of Bishop Iker was allowed to stay in property which the trial court ruled belonged to Bishop Iker's corporation, pending the final outcome of the appeal. See my earlier post on that topic for details.

ECUSA's provisional bishop in Fort Worth issued a pastoral letter to his parishioners in which he stated he was joined by ECUSA's Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry -- you may read it here. The letter is remarkable for showing a lack of understanding as to what the Court held, when it says:

I remain convinced that we are right in our affirmation that we are the continuing Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth and that I am its bishop.

Can the man not read English? Look at what the Court says in the first sentence of the paragraph that I first quoted above: "In sum, TEC’s determinations as to which faction is the true diocese loyal to the church and which congregants are in good standing are ecclesiastical determinations to which the courts must defer" (my emphasis added). The Court says it again on page 20: "No one disputes that TEC’s determinations as to its denominational leaders and “good standing” with the church are ecclesiastical questions." (The Court also said the same thing in its earlier opinion in the 2013 case of Masterson v. Diocese of Northwest Texas, as it shows by quoting a passage from it in its current opinion at page 23.)

This Texas case is not about whether ECUSA needs to follow its own Constitution and Canons when it fashions an ersatz diocese out of the remnant clergy and parishioners who elect to remain in ECUSA when one of its member dioceses votes to cancel its affiliation with General Convention. Those are ecclesiastical matters which cannot be determined in the civil courts, as ECUSA's own canons recognize.

By the same token, however, ECUSA's ecclesiastical powers do not extend to overriding the laws of the various States in which it operates. The very essence of "neutral principles" is that a church is treated just as any other citizen of that State would be when it comes to complying with the laws and regulations dealing with entities like corporations and unincorporated associations. To hold otherwise -- as the high courts in New York, California, Connecticut, Georgia and several other States have done -- is not only to misread Jones v. Wolf, but also to violate the First Amendment by favoring one religious denomination at the expense of others.

ECUSA and its rump diocese may be speaking softly for now, but true to their form, they most likely will petition the United States Supreme Court to review this decision in an effort to get that Court to explain just what it really meant in Jones. Given that Court's reluctance, in each of the dozen or so instances it has been asked to do so in the forty-odd years since 1979, I would not take any bets on ECUSA's chances of success. But when you have over $350 million in trust funds at your disposal, and have had no qualms about spending well over $60 million on attorneys and church property litigation since 2000, one's chances of success would not appear to be a factor under consideration.

In other words, keep your powder dry, and stay tuned for more.

South Carolina Supreme Court Rebuffs ECUSA Again

On Tuesday, March 31, the South Carolina Supreme Court entered an order that denied without comment the petition filed the previous month by ECUSA and its ersatz diocese in South Carolina seeking a "writ of prohibition" (that is, an order to halt proceedings) directed to the Circuit Court of Dorchester County (Hon. Edgar Dickson, Judge) in an effort to prevent him from interpreting or clarifying the August 2, 2017 splintered decision of that same Supreme Court.

This was the second attempt by ECUSA's attorneys to derail the proceedings on remand before Judge Dickson, who was assigned to the case by the Court after three of the Justices (one of whom belatedly recognized she was disqualified) voted to reverse the judgment of Circuit Judge Diane Goodstein. That judgment had declared that the real and personal property of each individual Anglican parish belonged to that particular parish, and the diocesan property was owned by the diocese and trustees headed by the Rt. Rev. Mark Lawrence. Last March, ECUSA and its diocese filed with the Supreme Court a petition for a writ of mandamus (an order directing a lower court to do a specific act) seeking to have the Court command Judge Dickson to "enforce" the rulings contained in its August 2017 decision. The Court denied that petition without comment, as well.

This time, the order dismissing the request for a writ of prohibition was signed by all four Justices currently qualified to act on the case (with Justice Hearn having disqualified herself). That can be interpreted as a fairly strong statement that the majority of the Court is not persuaded that Circuit Judge Dickson is doing anything improper on remand. As Bishop Lawrence's attorneys pointed out in their opposition to the petition (see p. 6), and as their own attorneys conceded in argument before the Circuit Court, ECUSA and its diocese can always take an appeal from any final order that Judge Dickson sees fit to enter. That admission alone was sufficient ground for the Court to deny ECUSA's petition.

How do ECUSA and its attorneys manage to contend that there are any "rulings" in the August 2017 decision capable of being enforced? By vastly oversimplifying the jumble of five separate Justices' opinions, that's how.

I have demonstrated in earlier posts just how divided and disunited were the individual Justices (including especially Justice Hearn, who had not yet seen fit to disqualify herself -- on the ground that she was an active member of one of the parishes whose property was at stake in the case, and had earlier underwritten the effort by dissident Episcopalians to remove Bishop Lawrence from his position). It is logically impossible to derive any legal result from the five opinions other than that three of the Justices (including the one now disqualified) voted to reverse the trial court's judgment.

So Judge Goodstein's judgment awarding the property is now reversed. What comes next? Ah, that is the question -- and one looks in vain for a mandate (direction) from any three of opinions as got what the Circuit Court should do on remand towards entering a new judgment. As Judge Dickson said at the outset of the arguments on the motions before him:

The Court: The first motion that I have today, going through the list that y'all gave me the last time y'all were here, and I think the one I am most interested in is the motion to decide what I am supposed to decide. The clarification motion, okay.

In response to the contention by ECUSA's attorney, Mary Kostel, that the Court's ruling as to who owned the property was "clear", Judge Dickson responded: "We would not be here if it was clear."

And indeed, as pointed out in Bishop Lawrence's response to the petition for mandamus, just one day before filing its motion for enforcement with Judge Dickson, ECUSA had filed a brief in opposition to Bishop Lawrence's petition to the United States Supreme Court for a writ to review the August 2017 decision of the South Carolina Supreme Court (p. 4):

On May 7, 2018, Petitioners [in the Circuit Court, i.e., ECUSA and its diocese] argued to the United States Supreme Court that it should not grant Plaintiffs' Petition for Certiorari because the Collective Opinions were "a poor vehicle for review." Brief of Respondents in Opposition to Petition for Writ of Certiorari, 2018 WL 2129786 at 23-26. Petitioners [ECUSA and its diocese] contended this was so because the Collective Opinions are based on an "incomplete record", which "contains significant ambiguities." Id at 2, 23. The Collective Opinions are "fractured not only in rationale but even on facts." Id at 2, 9. The absence "of a majority opinion on the standard of review" creates "ambiguities" making it "difficult to discern which of the trial court findings stand." Id. at 23-24.

This is just another example of ECUSA's unabashed hypocrisy in making diametrically opposed arguments to different courts, depending on the occasion. (For another egregious example, see this post.) For the US Supreme Court, the jumbled South Carolina opinions were "ambiguous" and "difficult to discern", but in the South Carolina Circuit Court, just one day later, all was suddenly "clear." lol

Unfortunately, many lay members of ECUSA's South Carolina diocese are swayed by their attorneys' oversimplification of the South Carolina Supreme Court decision, as shown in various of their blogs and comments. (I will not link to them; they are in their own bubble, and do not wish to be disturbed by the truth.)

For them, this case should have been over long ago, thanks to the boost that Justice Hearn gave to their case (and of course, they see nothing wrong with her conduct). They feel they won in the Supreme Court, fair and square, and now all that's left is for them to take over the Anglicans' properties and bank accounts.

But such people misread the purported "summaries" by two individual Justices (Hearn for the majority voting to reverse, and Toal for the dissent) as speaking for the whole Court, when the fact is that there was no one opinion joined in by any three justices of the five. There were three votes only for a single result: reverse Judge Goodstein’s judgment. Once reversed, the task returns to the Circuit Court to apply the law as decided by the Supreme Court to the evidence in the case.

Judge Dickson is obviously not persuaded by ECUSA's slick arguments; otherwise he could have entered an order granting their "enforcement" petition long ago.  Instead, he called for each side to submit page and line references to the case transcript showing exactly where each and every individual parish "acceded in writing" to the Dennis Canon. In doing so, he is simply taking Chief Justice Beatty at his word, since it was his vote to reverse the trial court's decision that determined the 3-2 outcome on that point. In his opinion, the Chief Justice wrote (with my emphases added):

These parishes that did not expressly accede to the Dennis Canon should retain ownership of the disputed real and personal property. (421 S.C. at 249, 806 S.E.2d at 102.)  

TEC argues that the parishes' accession to the Dennis Canon created the trust. Assuming that each parish acceded in writing, I would agree. (Id. at 250-51, 806 S.E.2d at 103.)  

In my view, the Dennis Canon had no effect until acceded to in writing by the individual parishes. (Id. at 250, 806 S.E.2d at 103.) 

. . . the parishes that did not accede to the Dennis Canon cannot be divested of their property. (Id.)

Could he have been more clear? He was simply assuming that twenty-nine of the thirty-six plaintiff parishes (per Justice Hearn's count; according to Acting Justice Toal, there were only twenty-eight claimed by ECUSA) "acceded in writing" to the Dennis Canon, because that is what ECUSA's attorneys represented to the trial court in an undocumented and unreferenced statement in a post-trial brief.

Statements by attorneys can never count as actual evidence; they only represent what they believe the evidence shows. (ECUSA never bothered to put the actual evidence of "accession" into the trial record, so there was nothing for the Supreme Court to review on that point, and nothing on which any of the Supreme Court's justices could have based a definitive conclusion.) And as Judge Dixon is now finding out, that representation by ECUSA's attorneys was wrong.

According to the papers filed by Mark Lawrence's attorneys with Judge Dixon, not a single plaintiff parish ever signed a document stating that they expressly agreed to the trust which the Dennis Canon attempted to impose.  And remember that Chief Justice Beatty, in contrast to Justices Hearn and Pleicones, agreed with Justice Toal in dissent that under South Carolina law as defined in the (2009) All Saints Waccamaw case, only an express written agreement by a parish to place its property into a trust for ECUSA's benefit could create an enforceable trust in that State. Again, to quote from the Chief Justice's opinion:

Further, in my view, the Dennis Canon, by itself, does not have the force and effect to transfer ownership of property as it is not the "legally cognizable form" required by Jones. See Jones, 443 U.S. at 606 (recognizing that courts must give effect to churches' intent when deeds and trust documents executed by the general church "provided [the documents] are embodied in some legally cognizable form"). While the Dennis Canon may use the term "trust," this word alone does not unequivocally convey an intention to transfer ownership of property to the national church or create an express or constructive trust. See Lollis v. Lollis, 291 S.C. 525, 530, 354 S.E.2d 559, 561 (1987) ("In order to establish a constructive trust, the evidence must be clear, definite, and unequivocal.").

That is the only position that is consistent with the Court's earlier holding in All Saints Waccamaw. Once again, I remind those uninformed bloggers sympathetic to ECUSA that only two Justices voted to overrule Waccamaw and reinstate a rule of deference to ecclesiastical authority, but they were in the minority on that point. The other three Justices -- a majority -- voted to uphold the doctrine of neutral principles as enunciated in Waccamaw. 

And that means that the Circuit Court is bound by Waccamaw as well. Absent a writing signed by the individual parish's authority, that Court is not free simply to hand over the properties to ECUSA's minions. Following the Supreme Court's majority, Judge Dickson is bound to rule in accordance with the actual evidence of consent -- or lack thereof. If ECUSA's attorneys cannot produce any such evidence (and to date they have not; only blanket, generalized affirmations of the Constitution and Canons, which will not suffice under Waccamaw), the properties will stay as they now are.