In a 49-page brief filed today with the Texas State Supreme Court, attorneys for the Diocese, Corporation, and congregations asked the Court to uphold several previous Appellate Court decisions and establish Neutral Principles as the method for resolving church property disputes in the state.
Neutral Principles, accepted in 36 states and approved by the U.S. Supreme Court since 1979, is a method of settling questions of church property ownership using the same rules that govern ownership of other types of private property, and it removes courts from wading into doctrinal disputes.
I have always recognized that a diocese that purports to have departed the Church presents a court with different issues than a departing group of people within a parish. Further, I haven’t had a chance to read the brief and realize that there often is a disconnect between the actual contents of legal documents and press releases issued about them, but I would have thought that it is a no-brainer, nothing-much-needs-to-be-said point that neutral principles will govern these dispositions. I would have thought the first paragraph of the Court’s decision would have cited, almost as boilerplate, that it applies neutral principles and will not pick winners or losers based on evaluation of the doctrinal or theological claims and opinions of the parties even if neither party had reminded them that that is the required analysis. Having acknowledged that point, as lower courts and all parties on both sides of these disputes presumably do, it still seems to me that departing groups trying to take over property have a very tough, uphill battle in explaining how the governing rules and structures of the Episcopal Church and its parishes and dioceses, would permit a person or persons to leave and thus gain property rights against those who do not leave. A neutral review of the property documents would seem to always favor those who did not depart. Of course, I haven’t reviewed the property documents in the Texas case any more than I have read the brief, so there may be more to this than I am aware of. But, again, I would be very surprised if those documents contemplated that there would be a schism that would cause ownership to reside in a group that departed the larger church structures, particularly where there is no evidence of any device within the Church rules permitting such an event.
Yes, #1, this is not Virginia (Ft Worth is a sovereign diocese no longer in association with other dioceses in TEC). In Ft Worth, the ‘leaving parishes’ factor was also dealt with differently, as the corporation of the Diocese of Ft Worth was quite willing and ready to negotiate and settle the matter as amicably as possible — as in CFL, Dallas, et al … and most recently NJ. This was not allowed in VA. The minority in Ft Worth did not want it allowed either. The language you eventually adopt in your remarks (‘a group that departed larger church structures’), after noting in opening that a diocese is not a ‘departing group,’ does not sound at all like the Corporation of the Diocese of Ft Worth, which is asserting its sovereignty and legal integrity.
Thanks, No. 2. I was not aware until your comment that there had also been individual parishes with members who departed TEC.
When people purporting to be a diocese decide to leave, I think the analysis will have to examine whether the constitution, canons, and governing documents of the church contemplate such an action. If people leave the church and represent that they are the “Diocese”, they will have objective support for that approach in church governance procedures. A related question is what happens to the Episcopal Diocese when substantial numbers of people leave and puport to become a non-Episcopal Diocese. I suspect the correct answer is that the Episcopal Diocese continues to exist as an administrative unit, but without the folks who left.
It will be interesting to see how this gets sorted in Texas.