Saturday’s vote will require two-thirds approval from San Joaquin’s 104 clergy and 154 laity delegates. They voted overwhelmingly last year, in the first of two votes, to amend the diocese’s constitution in a way that would allow it to leave the Episcopal Church.
Their decision will not only violate church law but lead to the defrocking of San Joaquin Bishop John-David Schofield, according to a Dec. 3 letter from Presiding Episcopal Bishop Katharine Jefforts Schori. The denomination is expected to declare the diocese “vacant” and sue to recover all the property of its 50 churches.
“I do not need to remind you of the potential consequences,” Bishop Jefferts Schori wrote Bishop Schofield. “If you continue along this path, I believe it will be necessary to ascertain whether you have in fact abandoned the communion of this church, and violated your vows to uphold the doctrine, discipline, and worship of this church.
“I do not intend to threaten you, only to urge you to reconsider and draw back from this trajectory.”
Bishop Schofield’s Dec. 5 reply called the Episcopal Church “an apostate institution that has minted a new religion irreconcilable with the Anglican faith.”
It occurs to me that, upon the moment of voting to remove itself from TEC, TEC’s See of SJ will become vacant by virtue of the diocese’s action and its leader will become a Bishop in the Province of the Southern Cone. Kate Schori can no more defrock +Schofield at that point than she can any other Bishop in ++Venables’ Province.
TEC’s DioSJ will go on, obviously, as a theoretical entity, sans buildings, sans clergy, sans parishoners.