Breakaway Episcopal Churches Win:
Via Mirror of Justice I learn that the breakaway Episcopal churches in Virginia have won in the trial court. Summary here and here and here.
There are some obvious implications of the judge's ruling for many mainline Protestant churches. I've followed the case in passing simply because I reside in Falls Church, Virginia, which is named after the Falls Church that is one of the lead breakaway churches so it has been a major local issue for some time. (In light of the contentiousness of the issues that underlie the division in the case, let's please keep comments civil and focused on the legal merits and ramifications of the ruling and not get into the social issues that underlie it.)
And I say that as someone who is what you would probably call an anti-theist.
I, like Adam, hate to see courts regulating the internal processes of churches, but at least the court reached the just conclusion.
Thus, I would find it appropriate for a Baptist congregation to retain ownership if it decided to leave some particular Baptist fellowship, but I would not find it appropriate for a Roman Catholic schizmatic. I don't think that a ruling that ignores that fundamental relationship would be a wise ruling.
Basically, the court has to follow neutral secular principles. In my case, treat it as a nonprofit corporation, and decide who was validly elected or chosen as if it had no religious aspect. The one thing forbidden is to decide it in light of which faction is more doctrinally pure or correct.
The Episcopal Church, along with the Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and some others, have a top down structure. Certainly those who choose to belong to those churches accept the church polity with respect to property ownership.
Other denominations, Baptists (of all stripes) and Congregationalists in particular, have a bottom up structure. Again, those who choose to belong to those churches accept the church polity with respect to property ownership.
As a result, as much as I sympathize with the Virginia dissenting congregations, they knew that Episcopal polity states that church property belongs to the denomination, not the congregation.
I suspect that the Virgina Supreme Court will ultimately reverse, but I am not betting the mortgage on that outcome.
Essentially, the denomination's claim boils down to "our laws say it's ours even though we don't have any property right in it."
GMUSL '07 alum: "Essentially, the denomination's claim boils down to "our laws say it's ours even though we don't have any property right in it."
And by their continued membership in and active support of the denomination, the local congregations agreed - until they decided that their sacred obligations were less important than their financial interests. That's a large part of why Paul teaches that these disputes are to be kept out of secular courts - secular courts cannot properly interpret and enforce sacred covenants. Given the size and stature of some of these congregations, it wouldn't be surprising if some of their members had served on district and denominational boards and groups that had the responsibility to enforce these rules - I suspect they raised no objection when it was someone else who had to live up to their word.
The three questions the trial court has had to determine is that if a division has occurred, which it answered in the affirmative, if the statute is constitutional, which it also has answered in the affirmative and whether the statute's procedures were followed properly.
It is an almost absolute certainty that once the trial has been concluded, the case will be appealed. The Episcopal Church is supposed to have an endowment of over $200 million. By the time all the dust has settled and the litigation is over that endowment will be a good bit smaller.
Nunzio -- I love the rigorous analysis.
(From Washington Times Article)
Yes, the congregants were trustees. And as trustees, they have not just the right, but the obligation to make the decision about the affiliation. If the Bishop, or an agent of the old regime, were the trustee, it's an easy decision the other way.
Holding the opposite -- that the congregants could not choose their affiliation as being trustees -- would improperly entangle the state with religious doctrine, and would violate the First Amendment.
On the other hand, it's strange that a congregation which begins, builds, funds, and maintains its property should have no rights in it, while the presbytery owns it.
On the basis of common sense, just short of flipping a coin, you'd think the congregation would have some kind of right.
But they'll be going with or without the property. Conservative clerics from Africa and the Southern Cone are proselytizing in America. Really strange. Those little brown people were supposed to bring diversity, which naturally means voting with the liberal hierarchs.
I don't know about the others, but in the ELCA brand of Lutherans there is a provision in many (most?) congregation's constitutions a provision regarding ownership and distribution of property on dissolution or division of the congregation. In the cases where it was adopted by the congregations, this engineer suspects it would be a matter of contract law if a congregation decided to separate from the ELCA. Congregations have separated from the ELCA in the recent past but I am not aware of how it was resolved. The provisions on property were adopted by the congregations as opposed to being imposed by the Synod, so the ELCA is a mix of top down and bottom up.
What, other than Church doctrine, does the old presybtery rest its claim on? They don't seem to have anything that would hold water outside an ecclesiastical court. As I know very little about the differences between Christian denominations or internal church workings, can you show me what I'm missing?
What goes around comes around...
There is theology at stake here -- each of these denominations was founded due to heartfelt beliefs in the Reformation about how best to resolve theological disputes, with each one favoring a different blend of Authority, Tradition, Discussion, Individual Biblical interpretation, etc.
So, the court decision really does cut at the heart of why these denominations exist and what they mean. If you can't be legally bound to a bishop's diocese, you can't have an Episcopal Church. In Virginia, it is now legal to have a Baptist organization, or a Roman Catholic one, but perhaps not an Episcopal one. And as an Episcopalian non lawyer, I have trouble understanding what the 1st Amendment is if it doesn't prevent a law from extinguishing a particular type of church.
Now if they want to give us back Oxford, Cambridge, and St. Paul's, THEN we can talk.
(I'm frankly unsure how they can give us back Ss John Fisher and Thos More. But I'll just take a pass on that.)
The property of Presbyterian Churches is held at the Presbytery level, in trust for the local congregation. So there is only one Presbytery to claim title--even if the local congregation leaves the Presbyterian Church and goes somewhere else.
The Presbyterian Church actually won most of its legal battles over this. The only time when the national denomination allow property to leave that I am aware of was when the the two largest Presbyerian denominations merged a few decades ago (ironically the split occurred during the civil war).
There is no religious doctrine involved in this structure--merely an organizational structure. Ironically, the Assemblie of God denomination, while having very different theological views, has a similar organizational structure.
I would note that my understanding is that synagogues are congregational in governance, so that if a synagogue wanted to leave whatever branch of Judaism it is affiliated with it would be very much like most Baptist congregations in how a court should look at church governance--even though there is even a greater theological chasm between Judaism and Southern Baptists than there is between Presbyterians and the Assemblies of God.
The old regime's position boils down to "we're the real church, decide for us." The court cannot decide which church is the real church.
Now, as the articles (again) make clear, the court has not awarded property yet to either group. All it has decided recently is that (1) a division triggering the statute has occurred and (2) that the division statute passes constitutional muster.
This isn't a particularly novel issue, either, despite the religious element. Try looking up the controversy surround, IIRC, the Satmar Rebbe and certain of the Lubavitcher sects. You guys are late to this party, too ;)
GMUSL alum - I apologize, but I don't understand your comment regarding Saul of Tarsus. The relevance of the teachings, as William Oliver discussed earlier, is that Christians are supposed to act in good faith to settle their disputes outside of secular courts. The teachings of the Bible are, at least theoretically, relevant to Christians. I also don't understand how applying Biblical principles to a dispute among Christians would be, as you say, applying secular law to a religous dispute. In what way do Saul's/Paul's/Biblical teachings constitute "secular law?" I'm sorry to be so obtuse...
In the case that I handled, the other faction announced a (flawed) special meeting of the members of the church/corporation, purged the vestry (board of directors), fired the pastor, and thereafter took out a $100,000 deed of trust on the church property, handed the money to their attorney (on whose ethics I cannot pass judgment without using words inappropriate to any website which does not have an age restriction, preferrably 40 or so), and then without disclosure offered to acknowledge the other vestry as the real directors provided that they stipulated that they had been the vestry up to that point.
Nice people. The court had to resolve, on a secular basis, who was the real vestry, or board. No way around it.
I wonder if the peculiar VA statutes about it stem from its disestablishment of the episcopal church in the late 18th century. Read an article about that once (noting it was all the more remarkable that the vast majority of the legislators voting for it were practicing members of that church), but remember no more. Here in AZ, if a church wants to set it up via trust, corporation, whatever, that's their concern. And the statutes recognize that a church can have any variety of arrangements. Hierarchical, membership-controlled, personally controlled, just like any business, it's your pick.
Sailor, sure they can -- absent a law to the contrary preventing that. And that's exactly what's present in this case.
William Oliver: The breakaway churches negotiated a separation protocol with the diocese of Virginia. When the national ECUSA organization found out about it, they instructed the diocese to break its agreement and sue instead.
Dave N.: The Falls Church and Truro were established in the colonial period. They antecede the establishment of the Diocese of Virginia: indeed, they antecede the existence of the ECUSA as an organized body. The churches are net contributors toward the diocese. It's hard to imagine any legal doctrine that would arbitrarily transfer these churches' property to the diocese. Unless the diocese could show some transaction--however negligible, including the usual "for the sum of one dollar..."--making the transfer, there would seem to be no argument. Simply because the national organization makes a rule that the diocese owns all the property does not make it so.
This pot will boil for years to come, although I suspect that much of the damage has already been done. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has seen huge membership losses in the last forty years, and is currently in a struggle where the General Assembly has again passed a constitutional change regarding homosexuality and the clergy that was previously rejected by a majority of the Presbyteries.
I believe that a significant part of the growth of the evangelical (and generally conservative) non-denominational has been individuals voting with their feet as the mainline Protestant denominations waver in the breeze of political correctness.
All of which says nothing about the legal issue....
Did you notice that I identified myself as a lapsed Presbyterian? There is a reason--and you hit upon them.
I am theologically quite liberal, certainly no fundamentalist, but I have no desire to conflate liberal social policy with theology. As a result, I feel pushed out by the church of my youth.
As I said originally, I sympathize with the congregations but I think on polity grounds the denomination wins.
Long story short: The unitarians in the Congregational Church -- it was mainly the clergy and other "elite" members -- tried to initially stave off controversy, keep the church together, by simply not discussing the Trinity and related doctrines of orthodoxy. But that strategy only lasted for so long; the Calvinists weren't stupid and noticed the conspicuous absence of discussions on their pet issues like the Trinity and original sin. As with homosexuality in the modern era, unitarianism began to "come out of the closet" more towards the end of the 18th Century/early 19th Century.
In 19th Century the Calvinists eventually actively disfellowed themselves (i.e., "broke away") from the unitarians and issued a series of legal battles in Mass. to try and take Church property with them. But, unlike with this decision, they lost and the liberals/unitarians got to keep the Church property.
The most famous decision on the matter was the Dedham decision and this played an important role in disestablishment in Mass., which in turn played an important role in US disestablishment history given Mass. was the last state to disestablish in 1833. Ultimately it was the conservative-Calvinists who said let's do away with the state established churches in Mass. because these liberal, heretical Unitarian Churches were getting the dominant benefit (or too much of a benefit) of state establishment aid.
Expecting the ECUSA to act in accordance with the teachings of Paul? Yeah, that's likely.
Now, the question is, how could the breakaway parishes have adhered to "And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well"? My suggestion is that the parishioners should have signed over the deeds to their homes en masse. If that didn't embarrass the ECUSA out of it, well, it would have driven home the point to the entire Anglican Communion, at the very least.
I am basically uncomfortable with the state declaring how internal religious disputes about ownership and authority are to be resolved. This is particularly true given the theological implications that these disputes, and the answers denominations have given about how to resolve them, have historically had.
In the end the state can declare everything to be secular except belief and the content of prayer books. But calling various church activities "secular" does make them so. Establishing a particular way to resolve internal church disputes has implications about what kind of religion the state will permit.
Will have to think about this. Clearly simply setting a default rule sets some sort of preference that increases the costs of one model over the other, but perhaps the effect is not as severe as it might appear at first blush.
The equivalent secular law would state that all community or commonly held property goes to the wife in any divorce.
Religious leaders who know about the law can protect their property interest by appointing only priests or pastors who are in line with their thinking, or, from a secular perspective, by requiring that each congregation fund its own repairs and expansions, or pay the diocese back for money used to buy and build the church.
For the American Church at least, property tends to be owned at the archdiocese level. There might be some canon law issues about it being directable at levels higher than that, but all a secular judge has to decide is "Is this person I see before me a representative of the corporate Archdiocese of Chicago? No? OK, that makes this pretty easy."
In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income. Now-a-days atheism is culpa levis, as compared with criticism of existing property relations.
I don't think your analogy is a good one. A similar secular situation would be membership in a family where all members signed a contract saying that all property of the family members belongs to the Patriarch. The Virginia law says that such a contract is not binding on kids who want to break away from the family and retain property rights to their home. Or to go back to your marriage example, it says that the wife can't sign a prenup that gives up all property rights.
I've only read news reports, so this is pretty uninformed, but it seems as if the VA law focuses on the (fairly unusual) corporate structure of churches and is neutral on issues of doctrine. The law is intended to address a corporate structure that (while it may make sense from a religious standpoint as a previous comment noted) doesn't address property concerns in a reasonable manner during a split.
Your last post was question-begging of the highest order. Obviously there is a law that says the breakaway congregation should get the property. The primary debate here is whether the law is constitutional. It is no answer to say "Yes, the congregation and denomination can do what they want unless the law says otherwise." The propriety of the law is at issue.
Having dealt with a lot of the same issues in church litigation in the past, it seems to me that this Virginia statute is rather obviously facially unconstitutional, restricting free exercise. The statute does not have any secular purpose, applying only to religious denominations in schism. The statute goes on to provide a rule of decision in intrachurch disputes as Gordo discussed above. The law severely burdens--for no good reason I can discern--the ability of top-down denominations and religions to enforce their own doctrinal organiational rules. That boils down to blatant unconstitutionality under the free exercise clause.
There is also an equal protection component here, again as Gordo mentioned above. Why should the congregational entity ALWAYS win and the denominational entity ALWAYS lose in these sorts of disputes? Even assuming that the courts (and, by extention, the state) could constitutionally intervene here, aren't there some conceivable disputes along these lines where the denomination is in the right and the schisming congregation is in the wrong?
As I mentioned previously, I am in complete agreement with the Episcopalians who object to homosexual ordination, but the First Amendment does not allow the outcome the departing congregations are seeking.
I believe that various presbyteries are letting some go with their property.
Yeah, the denomination is left with an empty building if they keep the property when the congregation leaves. Given the amazing growth of left-wing churches--not--the likelihood that they'll get what amounts to a doctrinal equivalent of the Unitarian/Universalist bunch in there to go along with HQ and still call themselves Presbyterians or Episcalopians is vanishingly small. Still, churches are built on land and many of them possess location, location, location. And most of the denominations could use some cash.
Some are being tough about it. The French Camp affair in Mississippi is one example.
In fact, Protestant churches with hierarchal organizations are in a bit of a political bind, at least in Virginia. Obviously they could, like the Catholic church, give the local bishop title to all diocesan property. (Though query what happens if the local bishop is a schismatic.) But a church that put its property in the name of the bishop might find its congregants reducing their financial contributions to the Roman Catholic level (Catholics give MUCH less money than Protestants). By allowing congregations to feel that they "own" their property, the Episcopal church increases the level of local giving. It doesn't seem unjust for the secular courts to take the organization at its word.
Many parishes are ancient. Their property and assets have been handed down in trust from the previous generation with the expectation that it will passed on to the next generation. By right it doesn't belong to the current vestry any more than the last vestry or the next vestry.
On the other hand, some parishes have been organized by the people who are still making the decisions. So, morally, each situation is different.
How I love it when some commenter tells me exactly what I should do with a vocabulary that reveals that he hasn't a clue!
That said - the denomination had plenty of opportunity to clarify title in the past, and accepted the benefit of leaving liability for the property with the congregation until now. Too late to cry foul now.
There were, however, a number of 20th century cases in which members of Orthodox synagogues were successful in using secular courts to block the majority from abolishing Orthodox seating. The cases turn on the theory that past donations were received in trust for the purpose of operating an Orthodox synagogue, and that ending the congregation's Orthodox status would be an impermissible diversion of those trust funds.
Thank God I belong to the fiercely congregational Christian Churches/Churches of Christ. We can have our problems, being human and all, but at least we don't have this one.
And if they had been willing and able to resolve it themselves, secular law even provides a mechanism for recognizing the outcome. I think we call it binding voluntary arbitration. Where did we get the idea that the law favors dragging every dispute into court, rather than working them out privately? We open our courts to everyone (and G-d bless the US for that fact among many others) but that's no reason that people of good will can't work things about among themselves.
I think you are missing the point. The relevance of Paul's writing is not on how it should influence the secular court. It's on how it should have influenced the parties to stay out of secular court. Further, in fact, any decision by the court, one way or another, is perforce secular involvement in a religious dispute -- that's what this is all about.
David Hecht: "The breakaway churches negotiated a separation protocol with the diocese of Virginia. When the national ECUSA organization found out about it, they instructed the diocese to break its agreement and sue instead."
Clearly, they would have been better off following Paul's advice, no?
Worse than that: at the time of the American Revolution, all the Anglican churches in America broke away from the authority of the bishop of London. Maybe the current bishop of London ought to be stepping into this litigation to seek a vindication of his authority over the secessionist parishes, especially the old ones (Truro, The Falls Church) that were established before the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America), which unilaterally broke away from the authority of his predecessor, just as they are now unilaterally seeking to break away from the authority of the bishop of Virginia.
In the 19th century, the property of many Catholic parishes in the United States was vested in trustees. It was precisely to prevent results like this that the Roman Catholic Church expressly prohibited such arrangements, and required that the property be vested in the bishop.
Of course, if ECUSA were acting in accordance with the teachings of St. Paul (e.g., Romans 1:26-27; 1 Timothy 1:10), this split wouldn't have occurred.
The law forbidding consensual (and nonconsensual) sex with children and allowing tort recovery in such cases is neutral with respect to religion and no free exercise argument would be successful in the situation you propose.
That is completely distinguishable from this case, where a law aimed exclusively at religious organizations overrides doctrinal exercise (and, frankly, overrides some fairly uncontroversial principles of trust and contract common law too). That is a huge free exercise issue.
You undermine your argument with the implied assertion that Paul wrote the Pastoral letters...
The proper resolution of this dispute is a close factual analysis of the title to the property and any contractual arrangements between the church and the diocese. A court must consider this analysis and make a decision on who owns the property when the church and diocese split. Religious issues should have nothing to do with it.
My objection is to a law that states that in such disputes the church always wins. That is the equivalent to a law that says in such disputes involving divorcing couples the wife always wins.
One observation made in other forums about this issue in general is that since the adoption of the Dennis Canon the Episcopal church has generally refrained from taking title to individual parish properties, in part to keep all properties insulated from claims of judgment creditors. (A claim against one parish for clergy predations against children or other parishioners, for example, would not be enforceable against any other parish's property.)
It should also be noted that the national Episcopal leadership has NO PROBLEM with parish property sitting empty or being disposed of to any party AS LONG AS the dissenting congregation doesn't have access to it. The congregations in this lawsuit had originally agreed with the Bishop of Virginia to pay him not to sue them for their buildings (to which they have held recorded title for decades if not centuries.) But the national leadership required the Bishop to back out of those deals and to file these lawsuits instead. If the Bishop had been negotiating sales of the properties to Roman Catholics or Jehova's Witnesses or even Starbucks there would have been no objection from the national office. It is only when a dissenting congregation tries to stay in its buildings that the law dogs are called out.
So now the Bishop is left with an IP claim - the breakaway bunch is using the Falls Church name (and the image of the edifice) for unrelated services. No establishment or free exercise issues in an injuction forcing them to be "The Nigerian Anglican Church of Falls Church".
You may not be a lawyer, and you may say that you don't have a clue, but I think that you have nailed this legal issue perfectly. This is not a question of religious laws or rules. It's a basic question of property law (which, thankfully, our CIVIL courts -- they are not "secular" courts -- have responsibility for within their jurisdiction). Who owns the property? And, therefore, who gets to decide what to do with it? The question is answered by the deed. The Virginia statute (and it is not that unique) provides that the deed controls the issue of who controls the property. The Episcopal Church had a hundred years to get the deeds re-titled, but they didn't do so. End of discussion -- without regard to church polity, church bylaws, the Bible, St. Paul, sin, or any other religious concept. It's basic property law. It's why we have common-law courts in the first place.
Next time, the church higher-ups need to get the property titled in the church's (corporate, under civil law) name, or in the name of a bishop, or some other appropriate legal method. That of course carries risks (ask the Catholic Church, which tried to shield diocesan assets by claiming that churches are actually locally-owned during the recent pedophilia scandals). But it maintains control. It's a classic legal choice which property owners are stuck with when the case comes to court, as in this case in Virginia shows.
I'm happy being a Baptist (we've got plenty of internal problems to deal with), where these issues now mainly focus on control of colleges and universities.
Also, how can the national Episcopal organization by a bylaw take property from others? What if the ABA passed a bylaw stating that all property of ABA-accredited law schools was actually held in trust for the ABA?
Sheesh. After 500 years, these people still can't find the right church. What will it take to make them happy? I'm sure in another 200 years or so, they will be breaking away from the Nigerians. Why don't they just GO.
Sailordave -- Your view seems to be the current majority view in church property cases nationwide. A good history can be found in the California Appeals Court decision Episcopal Church Cases. That is also a case involving churches splitting from The Episcopal Church (TEC) over liturgical innovation. The court decided that the diocese got the property. The California SC granted appeal in those cases so we have to wait and see what will happen.
The TEC split started in the '70s (back when it was still the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (PECUSA)). That split and the property cases was/were over the ordination of women and the abandonment of the Book of Common Prayer. Property cases since then have been continuous and have gone both ways. There's been a new increase in cases since Vicki Jean was consecrated as the Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.
Some parishes in the East have Royal Charters that predate the Domestic and Foreign Mission Society of the Protestant
Episcopal Church in the United States of America (the first name of the national bureaucracy established in the 1820's that became TEC). As with other institutions, a federal structure set up by independent entities for strictly limited purposes took over the whole shooting match.
In the '70's PECUSA (concerned about whole dioceses leaving the church) passed the Dennis Canons which say that the diocesan bishops hold all church property in trust for the diocese and TEC holds all diocesan property in trust for itself. The Dennis Canons (which attempted to convert PECUSA from an episcopal church to a primatial church) have yet to be tested in court. Three to seven TEC dioceses are in the process of disaffiliating from 815 Second Ave.
Busy time for church property lawyers.
They also have to examine any agreements and contracts among the parties. I may own my house, but the bank has a lien. i may own my house, by the city enforces zoning. Etc.
Catholics show the same attitude. When they have surplus property, they will pretty much never accept an offer from the Society of St. Pius X (followers of the later Abp. Lefebre), but will prefer to sell the church building, school, or whatever to Protestants, Hindus, or the followers of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
GMUSL alum - William Oliver had it exactly right, and says it better than me. I don't think the court should have applied Biblical teaching; I think Biblical teaching should have kept the parties out of court to begin with. Sorry if I wasn't more clear... and thanks for your replies!
On the other hand, it wasn't contributed with the expectation that the rector and her wife would be conducting Santeria chicken sacrifices on the high altar either.
I wouldn't bet that the retired oceanographer, Mrs. Schori, was what they had in mind as their spiritual leader either.
Er, make that "the *late* Abp. Lefebvre".
You wrote:
I don't see anyone on this thread that has said any such thing. Rather, what has been argued is that when a law constitutes a special rule for churches and operates to override church doctrine, as this law does, it is very likely a free exercise violation.
The Fourth Circuit has referred to it as the "ministerial exception" because most cases have involved exemptions of employment relations between churches and their ministers from the rules of various employment laws. Both the 4th and the 7th circuits have annouced they will presume the existence of such an exception even where not expressly stated.
The 7th circuit has gone farther and expressly renamed the exemption the "internal affairs" privilege, on the ground that the heart of what is priveleged is the right of a church to govern its own internal affairs free of interference by the state in its its governance structures. It has called this right substantially broader than simply an exemption limited to ministers.
Other points: many rabbis don't translate the ketubah for the bride and groom since its provisions (divorce) are offputting. On a fundamental level, is there a meeting of the minds?
And what if the court decided the provisions were against public policy (when asked to enforce them) as violating Western notions of marital rights.
The sharia problem all over again, but on the halachic foot, so to speak.
That is not the same thing at all. The issue there was not one of organisational affiliation but of actual practise. The plaintiffs weren't trying to keep the synagogues in some sort of "denomination", but to keep the services from changing in such a fundamental way that the donors who built them in the first place would have been unable in good conscience to pray there.
In the Virginia case, that argument cuts in favour of the churches and against the denomination. The donors didn't build the churches so that open and practising homosexuals could officiate in them as ministers. Or at least so would go the churches' argument. Whether they're right depends on how important priests' sexual behaviour has historically been in the Church, and whether the centuries-ago donors would have seen this as so important, in the way that the donors of Orthodox synagogues would have seen separate seating.
1. They really ought to translate it. Well, perhaps not literally, since it sounds strange rendered into English, and most of the terms used are formulas that the parties stipulate to but don't really mean much, and most of the ketuba's real provisions (tena'ei ketuba) aren't even in the document itself; but they should make sure both parties understand the obligations they're assuming toward each other, as well as what parts they can vary by mutual consent (most of it) and what parts they can't (ikkar ketuba). If they don't understand what the contract means, then there's a good argument that there's no meeting of the minds.
2. On the other hand, kol dimekadesh adaata derabbanan mekadesh, which is really a fancy way of saying that so long as the parties understand that the ketuba is a binding contract, and they know it's in some foreign language but don't inquire into exactly what it says, and they agree to it anyway, then they're in the position of anyone who knowingly signs a contract without reading it. They rely on the rabbis who crafted these terms and conditions to have known what they were doing, and they agree to be bound by them sight unseen. So long as there's nothing in there that no reasonable person could possibly agree to, the agreement would seem to be valid.
First,thank you for clarifying what I meant about changing the congregation beyond recognition. In both the mechitzah cases and the Episcopal Church cases, the issues involve whether to adhere to basic beliefs and practices or whether to abandon them and adopt practices more in keeping with the temporary whims of contemporary society.
Second, kol dimekadesh adaata derabbanan mekadesh can be analogized to incorporation by reference. The standard terms and conditions are well established and anyone who wants to can with minor effort see them in English beforehand. By suing the traditional Aramaic text, the parties agree to adopt those terms as thought fully stated in English.
Finally, the Ketubah is intended as a document for the religious courts. Like the Mahr (l'havdil)it does not meet the requirements of a pre-nuptual agreement in many states, and as far as I know very few people attempt to enforce it in the civil court system in the US.
What's ironic is that the diocese seems oblivious to the fact that what makes these churches valuable is their present congregations, who pony up (or who used to pony up) a substantial part of the diocesan budget. Even if the diocese wins, it isn't going to get that revenue stream back. (Oh, it will get an anemic trickle from the new congregation it installs in the property, roughly comparable to the income it gets from more compliant parishes in Northern Virginia.)
Maybe the diocese thinks that getting that prime real estate in the middle of the cities of Fairfax and Falls Church is going to help it fill its coffers, but that real estate isn't productive commercial property, and the only revenue stream it produces is the aforementioned contributions from the parishioners whom the diocese want to boot. Maybe the diocese could sell the property off, but I doubt it could sell off those historic buildings to developers who would build condos and offices on the property. That leaves the diocese the option of selling the property to a religious group, which raises the question of what happens if the highest bidders turn out to be the current vestries? The diocese could then either reject the vestries' bids out of spite, or it could accept them, in which case it would be in roughly the same position that they would have been if they had gone through with the separation agreement that was originally under discussion. (The purchase price the diocese might get from such a process might be higher than what it would have gotten under the separation agreement, but the additional money has to be weighed against the litigation costs it is incurring.)
Perfect! My analogy regarding religions was to imagine a parent who has several children. The children decide that it's time to honor this parent (presumably a father, naturally), but then they start bickering over how best to honor the father, and eventually they start killing each other over this.
Eventually Dad steps in and says stop trying so hard to honor me, and just get on with your lives. I'll be happy with an occasional phone call.
At least, thats my hope....
The Episcopal church in America has split. The dividing issues are well known. The split is inevitable. In the same letter Paul, speaking of people who take pride in their sexual immorality, says "with such people do not even eat". Now, one part remains in communion with the Anglican tradition, and the other, which includes the ruling hierarchy, is going its own way.
This dispute cannot be settled within the church, because the disputants are in different churches.
It hardly justifies the self-congratulatory, anti-gay, anti-establishment wisecracking. And there's really nothing that justifies the insulting name-calling in this thread. There are several posts here that would get you a visit to the Dean's office if published in a University newspaper.
As to ECUSA, if they are to be faulted, it is mostly for sticking to a slow and creaky set of procedures more suited the slow information transfer of the colonial days than the present.
Glad to know you and all your acquaintances are so pure and holy, unlike the rest of us. I'm sure God has a special place in heaven for people who like to discriminate against gays....
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