Judge Kim Dunning of the Orange County Supreme Court handed down on May 1 a surprise ruling in the case involving the property of St. James’s parish in Newport Beach, and held that St. James could not retain title to its property after it voted in 2004 to disaffiliate from the Episcopal Church (USA). But due to the bizarre reasoning she used to reach that conclusion, the ruling — if upheld on appeal — would put a cloud on the title of every previous sale or disposition of any Episcopal parish property in the State since 1980.
The wrinkle in the St. James case — a feature which distinguished it from the cases of two other parishes in the Diocese of Los Angeles (St. David’s Hollywood; and All Saints, Long Beach) which Judge Dunning ruled last September could not retain their properties either — was that St. James had been given an explicit letter from the Diocese in 1991 prior to purchasing the property at issue here, and undertaking the multi-million-dollar expense of developing it….