Q And who would be “the Bishop Diocesan” referred to by the Canon in this matter?

A In all cases involving charges made against bishops of the Church, the new canons (IV.17.2 [c]) make the Presiding Bishop, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the “Bishop Diocesan” for their purposes.

Q So the charges made against Bishop Lawrence could not have been dismissed in the first place without the consent of Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori?

A That is correct. And if she had done so, we would never have heard about them being brought — unless the complainants had appealed to the President of the Disciplinary Board (Bishop Henderson), and he decided to overrule the dismissal, and to send the charges to the Reference Panel. (There has probably not been time enough since the charges were filed for the appeal scenario to have played itself out to the point where we are now.) But if Bishop Matthews felt that the charges, if true, would amount to an “Offense” as defined under the new canons, then he could have sent them to the Reference Panel — which is where they appear to have gone next.

Read it all.

The Episcopal Church has launched an investigation of Bishop Mark J. Lawrence a year after the Diocese of South Carolina voted to distance itself from the national church because of disagreements stemming from the 2003 consecration of an openly gay bishop.

Two years ago, the diocese, under the leadership of Lawrence, voted to strengthen its autonomy and “begin withdrawing” from the church. In February, it changed its constitution, asserting the authority of the local diocese over the national church. The national church’s accusation of abandonment sets the stage for disciplinary action.

Read it all.

From Bishop Dorsey Henderson
President of the Title IV Disciplinary Board of the Episcopal Church
Concerning the Diocese of South Carolina:

–In the matter concerning the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, information is being reviewed by the Title IV Disciplinary Board. Bishop Dorsey Henderson is President of the Title IV Disciplinary Board.
–Information was presented from communicants within the Diocese of South Carolina.
–The information was not brought forward by the Presiding Bishop’s office, or by the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church. Therefore, the matter is not being handled by the Presiding Bishop’s office or anyone in the employ of the Episcopal Church Center.
–All information has been presented to the Disciplinary Board under the Episcopal Church Title IV disciplinary canons (laws of the church).
–In situations as this, the “church attorney” is an attorney who is retained by the Disciplinary Board to investigate cases brought to the Disciplinary Board. The “church attorney” is not the chancellor to the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.
–As a matter of law and a matter of respect to those involved, the Disciplinary Board operates confidentially and will continue to do so. As such, it would not be appropriate to discuss the details of the case in public.
–Bishop Henderson has been in conversation with Bishop Mark Lawrence of the Diocese of South Carolina.
–The Disciplinary Board is comprised of Episcopal Church bishops, clergy and laity.

Read it all.

Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina Bishop Mark Lawrence told his diocese Oct. 5 that “serious charges” have been made that he has abandoned the Episcopal Church.

The allegations are being investigated by the church’s Disciplinary Board for Bishops. Communicants in the Diocese of South Carolina filed the information with the board, according to the Rt. Rev. Dorsey Henderson, board president. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and the House of Bishops were not involved in making the claims, Henderson said in a fact sheet.

Read it all.

The recently announced disciplinary process against Bishop Mark Lawrence of the Diocese of South Carolina is deeply disturbing on at least two fronts. First, it sullies the Gospel and the Lord of the Gospel; second, it promises to do serious damage to The Episcopal Church (TEC).

In the first place, the allegations against Bishop Lawrence, and the claim that they may amount to “abandonment” of TEC are so absurd as to cross the line into deceit and malice. The fact that these allegations are being made and taken seriously by the leadership of TEC in itself constitutes an affront to the commitments for which a Christian church stands ”“ honesty, charity, care for the witness of the Church’s unity.

Read it all.

The Episcopal Church is alleging that Bishop Mark Lawrence has abandoned the church through his leadership of the Diocese of South Carolina that has distanced itself from the national church because of its policies of ordaining gay bishops and sanctioning same-sex unions.

Lawrence was contacted last week by the Disciplinary Board for Bishops of the national church. The letter said the board had evidence establishing the “abandonment of the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal Church.”

Read it all.

ECUSA’s General Convention in those days had as its primary function the hearing of reports on the status of the Church in each Diocese. Occasionally it was called on to admit another new diocese into union with the Church, or appoint a bishop to supervise a missionary diocese, and now and then it adopted amendments to the Canons. But its role on the national scene was largely ephemeral, and entirely forgettable.

What changed ECUSA structurally from its original model was the slow but steady growth in the size of its House of Bishops, as more and more territory came under ECUSA’s jurisdiction, and also the advent of powerful new social forces. The first factor forced a change in the office and functions of the Presiding Bishop; following that change, the second factor transformed the character of the Church itself, under the active leadership of the new breed of Presiding Bishops.

Read it all.

The tendency in all such bodies as our General Convention, is to centralize power; and unless there are well defined checks and barriers to it, we can not avoid its dangers. A centralized ecclesiastical power is an unqualified evil, and as surely results in corruption as if that were the goal of its ambition. A very superficial glance at the history of the American Church will show, that we have been drifting with accelerated velocity towards this danger, with almost the drowsy indifference of the lotus eaters.
.

“Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?”

When the first steps were taken to form a Church Union, each State had its own Church; which was, to all intents and purposes, a National Church, and was so regarded. Each State might have any number of dioceses within it. In the General Convention””no matter how many dioceses there might be within it,””each State was entitled to but one body of delegates. The Church Constitution, like that of the Government, did not seek to interfere with the political theory, that each State is sovereign in all local matters. Even the trial of bishops remained within the States until 1841, when, by reason of the change which had been made in 1838, allowing dioceses to be represented in the General Convention, a necessity arose for such a provision.

Read it all and look carefully at the date.

The retired longtime Episcopal bishop for Western Washington has been barred from exercising his ministry following what his successor calls “a credible allegation of marital infidelity.”

The Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner served as Episcopal Bishop of Olympia from 1989 to 2007: Warner surprised the 2002 Episcopal diocesan convention by announcing he was divorcing his wife of nearly four decades. He remarried shortly after his divorce.

“I first heard the allegations several weeks ago, and promptly reported them to the Presiding Bishop’s office, which is the procedure required by the canons of the Episcopal Church,” said Bishop Greg Rickel, Warner’s successor.

Read it all.

This is such a crucial preface to what follows that I shall restate it: only dioceses, in their given territories, are legal members of the association which is the Episcopal Church (USA). As such, they are free, under the First Amendment, to join it or to leave it at their pleasure, through duly enacted amendments to their governing documents — which ECUSA is, again under the Constitution’s First Amendment, powerless to annul or forbid.

Now comes an utterly supercilious pronouncement by an official on behalf of ECUSA’s Executive Council (citing the “decision” of one of its joint standing committees) with regard to the Diocese of South Carolina, and which purports to “declare” certain acts taken by a member diocese to be “null and void”. [A tip o’ the Rumpolean bowler to the Rev. Steve Wood’s blog, which in this instance was authored in his temporary absence by Greg Shore.]

Oh, really? And just who, pray tell, is this supra-diocesan “Executive Council”, or its “Joint Standing Committee on Governance and Administration”?

Read it all.

As the Diocese of Central Florida searches for its fourth bishop, seven nominees reflect its primarily evangelical identity. Both Anglo-Catholic and broad-church piety also are evident, but the nominees’ answers to questions posed by the diocese’s standing committee leave few doubts on what they believe about blessing same-sex couples or offering the elements of Communion to the unbaptized.

The standing committee asked all nominees to answer five questions [PDF] (including those on sexuality, Eucharistic practice, and how the diocese relates to the Episcopal Church). It also asked nominees to choose three of seven questions that dig deeper on theology and pastoral skills. Most nominees chose to answer this optional question: “How might you respond if a friend who was not a practicing Christian approached you and said, ”˜What would I have to do to be a Christian, and why would I want to do it?’” Most of the nominees cite specific and tangible moments of becoming Christian or deepening their relationship with God.

Read it all.

As readers of this blog are aware, your Curmudgeon is no fan of the Dennis Canon, which I like to call the Episcopal Church (USA)’s Trojan Horse. It has spawned a disproportionate amount of Church property litigation, because it operates by stealth, and springs onto the back of a parish just at the time when it is most vulnerable, having decided to take the final step to disaffiliate from ECUSA. All of a sudden, the Bishop of the Diocese swoops down with his attorneys, and orders the congregation to vacate its building, and leave everything behind, from the altar candlesticks to the bank accounts and pew cushions. “Because you no longer are operating within the Episcopal Church,” he says, “Canon I.7.4 [the Dennis Canon] declares that all of your property is now forfeit to the Diocese, since it was always held in trust for this Diocese and the Church.”

Such a claimed operation for the Canon comes as a surprise to many congregations who thought that their years of paying for the acquisition, construction and maintenance of their building, plus a deed in their name, meant that they owned it. Furthermore, every State in the United States has a law which says that trusts in real property can be created only by a writing signed by the owner of the property. The Dennis Canon operates in reverse: it purports to create a trust in church property without the owner’s signature, and just on the authority of ECUSA’s General Convention. As I noted elsewhere, it purports to operate as though, upon you and your spouse’s joining the Democratic Party, your house and all your worldly goods become forfeit to the Party should you ever decide to become a Republican.

Read it all.

Parry, 69, became a priest in the Episcopal Church in 2004 and until last month was the music director and assisting priest at All Saints Episcopal Church in Las Vegas. He told The Kansas City Star on Thursday that “my attorney has asked me not to say anything.”

Last month, Parry admitted to The Star that he had inappropriate sexual relations with several members of the Abbey Boy Choir from 1982 to 1987, when he directed the group.

The lawsuit, filed in Nodaway County Circuit Court under the name John Doe 48, seeks unspecified damages. It was announced Thursday at a news conference of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

Read it all and if you want the lawsuit document is and if you want you can see the key legal document there (20 pages).

The former rector of All Saints Church in Las Vegas, Fr. Eldwin Lovelady told CEN that during the five years Fr. [Bede] Parry was his assistant “I found him to be faithful to his priestly ministry, a wonderful pastoral presence to me and to members of the parish, and a friend.”

In an apparent contradiction to the bishop’s claim that restrictions were placed on Fr. Parry’s ministry and the “reasons for it conveyed” by Bishop Jefferts Schori to his supervisors, Fr. Lovelady said he “never had even the smallest hint of any kind of inappropriate behavior, or any inclination to such. I was not aware of anything in his past and now that I’ve been made aware of these allegations, I have not changed my opinion about Bede in any way and if I were still in the diocese of Nevada, I would be supporting him.”

Bishop Edwards’ claim the diocese did not receive the 2000 psychological profile of Fr. Parry is at odds, as he notes, with the claim made in a lawsuit filed last month in Missouri, which stated the Episcopal Diocese was given a copy of the report. However, the bishop’s further contention that any psychological profile conducted in 2000 that indicated a predilection for abuse would be “dubious” as such tests would not be developed until “20 years later” appears to be a misstatement.

Read it all.

The Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut
June 30, 2011

Dear Colleagues in Ministry:

We are writing to remind you as sisters and brothers in ordained ministry that the new Title IV disciplinary canons go into effect this coming Friday, July 1. For the past year we as a diocese have been preparing for the new Title IV. At our diocesan convention last year we voted in members of the new committees needed to support the Title IV process. Robin Hammeal-Urban has been leading educational offerings throughout the Diocese and in Province One, helping all of us to understand the new process and intent of the canon.

Further information on the new Title IV can be found on the Diocese of Connecticut website at:
http://www.ctepiscopal.org/Content/Clergy_Disciplinary_Process_Title_IV_.asp

The goal of the new Title IV is to embrace a form of clergy discipline based on restorative justice rather than retributive justice. We have moved away from a model of discipline based on the code of military justice (on which the outgoing Title IV was based) hoping to embrace more a process of collegiality and accountability amongst peers.

The new Title IV both broadens the guidelines of what needs to be “reported” with respect to actions that contravene the doctrine and discipline of The Episcopal Church and also includes more participants in disciplinary process. It thus requires that offenses to the doctrine and discipline of The Episcopal Church be reported by clergy to the Diocesan Intake Officer when they arise. Lay people may also report offenses, but since they are not “in orders” they are not required to do so. Robin Hammeal-Urban will be serving as our Intake Officer as an extension of her role as the Diocesan Pastoral Response Coordinator for the next year as we live into this new model.

One topic which has come up at almost all of the trainings and educational offerings that Robin has lead is the question of Open Communion. Canon 1.17.7. restricts eligibility to receive Holy Communion to persons who are baptized. The new Title IV presents us with the circumstance to consider what we believe about “open communion” in light of what the doctrine and discipline of The Episcopal Church is at this time. Some deaneries and delegates in the Diocese of Connecticut are thus looking at offering a resolution to our Diocesan Convention that will ask us to engage in a diocesan-wide conversation around “Open Communion”. In the meantime, your bishops are called to uphold the canons of the church as outlined in the Constitution and Canons voted at General Convention 2009.

The implementation of the new Title IV might cause some anxiety as we learn to live with the new canons. Still, if we can stay centered, open, and as well informed as possible, we trust that in time the new Title IV will serve all of us well as we seek always to be faithful to our ordination vows.

Faithfully,
The Rt. Rev. Ian T. Douglas
The Rt. Rev. James E. Curry
The Rt. Rev. Laura J. Ahrens

Before July 1, 2011, clergy disciplinary matters were brought to the bishop or the Standing Committee. After July 1, 2011 (under the revised Title IV canons) all matters will be reported to an Intake Officer (contact info below) who will create a written report. Following that, the matter could be resolved by pastoral care, mediation, an agreement with the bishop, an investigation, or any combination of these.

Read it all and follow the links if you have not read these documents.

An 18-member Disciplinary Board for Bishops has been established as required by the revised version of the Episcopal Church’s canons on clergy discipline, which go into effect July 1.

The board consists of 10 bishops, four clergy and four lay members. Eight of the bishops were elected by the House of Bishops at the group’s March meeting; two were later appointed by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori when vacancies occurred, according to a press release from the church’s Office of Public Affairs.

Read it all.

After the plaintiff reported the abuse in 1987, Parry was sent for three months of treatment at Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico. Then he stayed in the Southwest, working at Lutheran and Catholic parishes.

In 2000, the lawsuit says, Parry underwent psychological testing because he was considering entering another Catholic monastery.

“The results of this testing revealed that Fr. Parry was a sexual abuser who had the proclivity to reoffend with minors,” the lawsuit says.

The results were provided to Conception Abbey, the Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas and the Episcopal bishop for the Diocese of Nevada, the lawsuit says. Yet from 2000 until Thursday, Parry was employed by All Saints Episcopal Church in Las Vegas.

Read it all.

A Las Vegas Episcopal priest resigned from his duties at his church Thursday after his name surfaced in a lawsuit alleging a Missouri monastery covered up sexual abuse by him.

The lawsuit, filed in Missouri by a former choir boy, alleged the Roman Catholic monastery, Conception Abbey, kept secret the boy’s 1987 sexual assault by Bede Parry, then a Catholic priest who directed the choir.

Parry, 69, who was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, had been serving as the organist and choir director at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Las Vegas since 2000.

Read it all.

Notice how the conclusion does not even begin to follow from the premise. Because the Constitution does not circumscribe the authority of the Presiding Bishop does not mean either (a) the authority must be unlimited; or (b) that General Convention has the power to define the authority of that office — or to add to, or detract from, its authority on its own. And since duty flows from (and is defined by) authority, having the power to prescribe duties appropriate to the authority that has been given is not the same as having the power to create new authority by creating new “duties.”

Can anyone today seriously argue that the office of the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA is without any limits on its authority? The Title IV Task Force II seems to think so — and they defend their extension, sub rosa, of metropolitical authority to that office on the ostensible ground that such authority is “nothing new,” because General Convention “has never considered that office to be limited as the Runyan & McCall paper states.”

Only persons who were determined to ignore the evolutionary history of the office of Presiding Bishop could make such an outlandish statement….

Read it all.

Thus, the justification offered by the “Task Force II” on Title IV has no historical basis in fact, and constitutes a misreading of the intent of those who enacted the language. And as argued at the outset of this post, there is no rational basis for dividing the power to establish courts from the power to define their jurisdiction, constitution, and procedures. Read in that way, Article IX becomes a mere fig leaf: the real power to create the courts, notwithstanding the language of Article IX, lies in General Convention.

And so to read Article IX, in a paper submitted by the authors of the revisions to Title IV, is to express everything that is wrong with the current views of the leadership of ECUSA as to its polity. In the state court lawsuits, over and over again, that leadership has beat the drum for ECUSA’s “hierarchical” polity, when — as shown in the first post in this series — there is no such hierarchy as between the dioceses themselves, or when assembled in General Convention. The proof of this point lies in the latest revisions to Title IV themselves. On the “Publications” page of General Convention may be found links to various documents regarding the revisions, including a set of “model” canons for the dioceses to enact in order to implement the revisions.

Without the dioceses enacting those (or similar canons) in their own separate conventions, the changes to Title IV approved at the national level in 2009 could never take effect….

Read it all.

Officials of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina affirmed this month their sovereignty and discussed the need to encourage growth by starting new congregations.

Read it all.

Before taking up their memorandum in detail, however, I want to put some of the matters involved into a proper perspective. Some of what I will now say may come as a surprise to those who are unacquainted with how ECUSA came into being….

First proposition:

General Convention is not the “supreme” (highest) authority in the Church — it never has been, and (unless the current liberal takeover is perfected) never will be….

Second proposition:

As formed in 1789, and as continued in existence ever since, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America is a voluntary confederation, and not a forever indissoluble union, of dioceses….

Read it all.

The Diocese of South Carolina’s 220th convention has revised six articles [PDF] of its constitution, distancing itself from canon-law revisions approved by General Convention in 2009.

The revisions met the required two-thirds majority for a second consecutive meeting of the diocesan convention, and the diocese’s constitution is now revised.

South Carolina was the first diocese to challenge major revisions to Title IV of the Episcopal Church’s Constitution and Canons, which regards ecclesiastical discipline.

Read it all.

Saying they are aiming to answer claims that a revised set of Episcopal Church disciplinary canons set to go into effect July 1 are unconstitutional, several of framers of the changes to Title IV have issued a paper which they assert “conclusively establishes the constitutionality of the amendments.”

The statement, posted here, was written by Duncan Bayne, Diocese of Olympia vice chancellor; Stephen Hutchinson, Diocese of Utah chancellor and Joseph Delafield, Diocese of Maine chancellor. Delafield, the spokesperson, said that all three were “active participants in the nine-year process of development and adoption of the amendments.”

Read it all.

South Carolina is thus far the only diocese in the Church to take measures to prevent the changes to the national Canons, which are scheduled to go into effect this July 1, from taking effect within its boundaries. I have explained some of the reasons why those changes are contrary to ECUSA’s Constitution in this earlier post: essentially, they extend unprecedented metropolitical powers to the Presiding Bishop, which that office has never been authorized to exercise, and they radically add to the authority of local bishops over their own diocese’s disciplinary proceedings.

Three other dioceses have protested the scope of the revisions made by General Convention in 2009 to Title IV of the Canons (having to do with disciplinary proceedings against clergy). Some have called for General Convention to revisit the subject, and scale back the powers granted to diocesans and to the Presiding Bishop. But most dioceses (including my own, alas, which I could not deter) have implemented the changes into their own canons, by making revisions in the disciplinary proceedings and in the bodies that carry them out.

Thus ECUSA heads into a Constitutional crisis of its own making, which its leadership seems determined to ride out, confident that the Executive Council and General Convention will back them up. As with the leadership’s current litigation strategy, the course is a very high-risk one for them to take….

Read it all.

Both important resolutions passed [for the second time as required] on the necessary vote by orders by more than the specified 2/3 vote margin necessary for their passage.

The Bishop’s address focused on church vitality, church planting, stewardship, and our collective future–KSH.

Central Florida joins three other dioceses ”” Dallas, South Carolina and Western Louisiana ”” in expressing concerns about the new canons on discipline, which become effective July 1.

The diocese asks General Convention “to modify New Title IV, as it applies to the Diocese of Central Florida, so as to comply with the Constitution.” The resolution expresses two concerns about the new Title IV: that it “empowers the Presiding Bishop to take certain actions within the Diocese of Central Florida in violation of Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution,” and “creates a charging and trial system applicable to Presbyters and Deacons in violation of Article IX of the Constitution which provides that presbyters and deacons shall be tried by a court instituted by the convention of the Diocese.”

Read it all.

I am reliably informed they all passed–take special note of R-2 and R-3 and read them though.

What I wish to call your attention to in this post is something that had completely escaped me in previous visits to the multifarious litigation occurring in Fort Worth. One of the attorneys for Bishop Ohl and the Local Episcopal Parties, Jonathan Nelson (he argued at the initial hearings in front of Judge Chupp), who is now on his own, was earlier in a law partnership in Fort Worth called Broude, Nelson & Harrington, P.C. As a member of that law firm, he represented the Corporation of the Diocese of Fort Worth in a 1993 lawsuit against the Rev. M. L. McCauley, of the Church of the Holy Apostles, who had voted with his vestry to leave the Diocese and join the Antiochean Orthodox Church.

Bishop Iker was then the Co-Adjutor of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, scheduled in 1994 to succeed the Rt. Rev. Clarence C. Pope, Jr., who as the diocesan was also the head of the associated Corporation. That Corporation, in turn, was established to hold legal title to the real property of all the parishes in the Diocese — including the Church of the Holy Apostles. Thus when the Rev. McCauley and his vestry claimed the right to continue to occupy the parish’s property after they had joined the Orthodox Church, the Corporation of the Diocese had to become the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed to oust them from possession. The attorney who participated in drafting the complaint and supporting affidavits for the plaintiff Corporation, and who signed his name to the pleadings, was Jonathan Nelson, of Broude, Nelson & Harrington, P.C., Fort Worth, Texas.

Now that same Jonathan Nelson is representing the minority who, with their provisional bishop, has brought suit against Bishop Iker and the other trustees of the diocesan Corporation. And he has the gall to offer, on behalf of his current clients, the very pleadings and affidavits which he mainly drafted in the 1993 lawsuit as ostensible “judicial admissions” on the part of his former clients.

Read it all.