According to Professor Mullin, there is this abstraction, which he calls “General Convention”, which does everything in the Church, from drafting the Church’s own Constitution, to selecting bishops and instructing on education, clerical responsibilities and rules for ordination. But just what is this “General Convention? It is made up of the delegations and bishops from individual member dioceses. It is no “supreme executive”, having a continuous existence and single mind that remains coherent and uniform over time, like an individual person. Instead, General Convention completely reconstitutes itself every three years — for a period of just ten days at most. The General Convention of the moment is not bound by any prior Convention, and cannot itself bind any future Convention.<\/p>\n
Because General Convention can act only through its deputies and bishops, it is, correctly speaking, simply a collection of individuals. It “acts” or “decides” by taking votes. Usually they are simple voice votes, but on more important matters they are roll call votes by each order in each diocese. (Only the House of Bishops acts at all times by majority vote of its members, who constitute a single order in the Church.) Nevertheless, even when voting by orders, the overall concept of General Convention is that a concurrence by the majority of the member dioceses is necessary for any action or decision to be taken.<\/p>\n
Professor Mullin’s analysis, by way of contrast, replaces the members of an unincorporated group with an abstract, impersonal entity that is supposedly superior to the group itself, and that supposedly exercises supreme powers over that group. But as we have just seen, this “entity” is nothing other than what you and I would call a “majority.”<\/p>\n