US Church spends £1.5 million on lawyers in property battle: CEN 3.05.10 p 7.

David Booth Beers

The Episcopal Church’s national offices in New York spent over £1.5 million for lawyers last year in its fight to hold on to the assets of departing dioceses and congregations, preliminary financial figures show.

This total represents only a portion of the funds expended and does not include the bills for dioceses and parishes. A number of dioceses are believed to have spent more than the national church in legal fees. At its annual synod last month, the Diocese of Virginia reported it had spent over $3.5 million of a $4 million line of credit taken out to regain the properties of the breakaway Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA).

The December 2009 preliminary balance statement released by the national church shows that legal assistance for dioceses fighting secession battles had been budgeted at $100,000 for the year. The actual amount spent was $2,346,347—23 times over budget.

The new year saw no lull, nor has there been any final reckoning. On March 1 the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari, or declined to review the appeal of a St Luke’s Church in La Crescenta, California, which lost its bid to secede from the Diocese of Los Angeles for the Church of Uganda and keep its property.

On Feb 15 the loyalist faction of the former Episcopal Church parish of All Saints Waccamaw on Pawley’s Island, South Carolina filed a petition for review to the US Supreme Court of the Sept 18, 2009 South Carolina Supreme Court ruling that permitted the congregation to quit the diocese and keep its property.

The Diocese of Pittsburgh under the leadership of Archbishop Robert Duncan, leader of the Anglican Church in North America, last week filed an appeal to the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court of a local court order directing it to turn over its assets to the Diocese of Pittsburgh affiliated with the Episcopal Church, while in Texas, the Diocese of Fort Worth has filed a writ asking the Court of Appeals to dismiss the case brought by the loyalist faction of the former Episcopal diocese, seeking to control the name and a assets of the diocese now part of the ACNA.

Litigation continues in California’s Fifth District Court of Appeal in Fresno, were briefs were filed last November in the case of the Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin v. the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin. In June 2009 a lower court granted summary judgment to the Episcopal diocese in its bid for control the assets of the Anglican diocese.

Disputes between breakaway congregations and their former dioceses are underway across the United States in Connecticut, Tennessee, California, Nebraska, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia and California, while in Virginia the state Supreme Court is schedule to hear an appeal from the Diocese of Virginia against a lower court ruling that permitted eleven conservative congregations to secede with their property.

The battle between left and right also extends to the clergy and their lawyers. On Feb 15, the bishop of the loyalist faction of the Diocese of Fort Worth deposed 57 clergy aligned with the majority faction that seceded with the Diocese from the Episcopal Church. Last November, the Diocese of Long Island filed suit against the lawyers for a New York parish, including the son-in-law of Archbishop Duncan, that quit the diocese. In 2008 a court awarded custody of the parish property to the diocese, which now is seeking to recoup the $205,000 paid to the parish’s attorneys, claiming they were unjustly enriched by the litigation.

Conservatives are also suing each other in America. In December, the Rt. Rev. David Moyer, the rector of Anglo-Catholic bastion Good Shepherd, Rosemont sued his former attorney following his loss for a suit of unjust dismissal leveled against Bishop Charles Bennison, Jr. of Pennsylvania. Bishop Bennison is also pursuing an appeal of the ecclesiastical court case that found him guilty of conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy for mishandling his brother’s sexual abuse of a teenage girl many years before, when he was a rector in California.