A marvelous response, firm but not rude and disrespectful (alas, any letter I might write the PB would probably be both rude and highly disrespectful).  Think of it perhaps as “calling her bluff.”

It’s highly ironic that the lawless PB is condemning the Standing Committee for not abiding by the all holy, sacrosanct Constitution and Canons of TEC, when she herself violates them whenever she finds it necessary.  For her, truly the end seems to justify the means, as this letter from her attests.

Way to go, Fr. Wilson!  I’m proud of the Standing Committee.  As +Bob Duncan the Lion-Hearted has often said, “Courage breeds courage.”

David Handy+

Fr Handy—On ignoring the canons, KJS was reading from Jackboot Jane’s book.

Yessir, David!  Both of you!

Has anyone tried settling this with a bucket of water tossed onto the PB?

Part of the reasoning behind the name change to TEC was the fiction that TEC was a communion that extended beyond the boundaries of the United States. A logical extention of that is KJS’s tacit assertion that she defines membership by who she deems to be in communion with her. There can be no other rationale for her blatant power grap in assuming authority where none exists in the canons.

Incisive!

Jeff,
As KJS has stated in the past:
“The canons mean what [ the presiding bishop ] wants them to mean.”

HYPOTHETICAL: The General Motors executives in charge of the Cadillac division announce that they are disassociating from GM because they’re not satisfied with GM’s business philosophy.

QUESTION: Who gets the Cadillac factory, the brand rights, the dealership contracts, the buildings and fixtures, the office supplies, etc.? 

ANSWER: General Motors, of course.  The Cadillac execs would be horse-laughed out of court if they claimed Cadillac had ‘seceded’ from GM.  Putting it most charitably, its execs constructively resigned en masse. As with any other resignation, the courts aren’t going to let them take so much as a desk stapler with them. The execs would be seriously delusional if they thought otherwise.

#8, I’ve seen some silly analogies, but that one takes the cake.

#8 You lost me on this one.  The Cadillac execs didn’t buy their buildings, the office supplies, fixtures, etc., etc.  OTOH, the churches who have remained within the Anglican Communion while leaving TEC ...

Brian

removed—please offer substantive comments on the text of the letter rather than personal attacks against KJS.—elves

Brian [#10], let’s stipulate that it was the efforts of the Cadillac execs and workers, and those of their predecessors for the past 100 years, that resulted in the Cadillac sales that funded the Cadillac buildings, office supplies, etc., and paid the employees’ salaries. I don’t see how that materially changes the hypothetical.

Brian [#10], let’s stipulate that it was the efforts of the Cadillac execs and workers, and those of their predecessors for the past 100 years, that resulted in the Cadillac sales that funded the Cadillac buildings, office supplies, etc., and paid the employees’ salaries. I don’t see how that materially changes the hypothetical.

Cadillac is a brand within General Motors.  Its vehicles are produced at assembly plants where other GM-branded vehicles are assembled.  GM created Cadillac, owns Cadillac and runs Cadillac.  At no time was there an organization called “Cadillac” that had to petition to join GM.  It never was, is not, and never will be an independent entity.  The workers, executives and others you point to did not give money, time, etc. to Cadillac to build the organization, but were paid to perform certain duties.

It’s completely inapt and, as I said, silly.

DC - I don’t do Corporate stuff.  Does Cadillac have stock separate from GM?  If so your analogy is comparable.  Then it would be whatever the majority stockholders vote. 

In DioPitts, the majority stockholders voted to leave the federation they were in and align with another.  The head of the federation has no control over the corporate shell, assets, etc.

Here in the Washington DC area, the Roy Rogers franchise (fast food - burgers), owned by Marriott was sold to Hardees and converted.  However, there were a number of independent RR stores and they continued as Roy Rogers restaurants.  Marriott had no control over them. 

A better analogy for your side would be to try to compare this to the Civil War (or as they still try to say here in Virginia, the War between the States).  However, as I think Prof. Jaffa has demonstrated, the compact that the States drew up - making one Nation, did not allow for unilateral withdrawal (despite the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, nullification and the other separatist doctrines), whereas the Episcopal Church has never been anything other than a confederation (General Convention).

D.C. Toedt,
You are attempting to compare a non-profit, voluntary, faith-based organization (in this case, a diocese) that loosely confederates to over 100 other independent dioceses to a for-profit business that uses a strict hierarchical business model, sells stocks to shareholders (who expect a profit and can fire the CEO and other sub-performing managers and employees) and must compete against all other businesses for shareholder dollars (not just other car makers).  And when a division of GM is sold off, the company divides the profit/loss among the stockholders.  I suspect that the break-up of the former Soviet Union is a closer analogy.

Or, DC, to put it another way.  Let’s suppose the executives in the Cadillac division decided they were now going to make hula hoops instead of luxury cars and told the workers they were going to have to retool.  The workers at the factories in most factories were good, obedient workerbees and did what they were told.  Sure most of the factories lost quite a few workers and sales were way down.  But the Caddy brass said “All was Well” and continued on.  Meanwhile workers in the Fresno, Pittsburgh, Ft. Worth factories (and a few other places) looked at their GM paychecks and their union contracts and the directives being issued by the GM Board of Directors and said, “By golly, we’re going to go on making cars and we’ll do it for GM directly if we can’t do it for Cadillac.”

This analogy is comparable.

Jeffersonian [#13] writes: “GM created Cadillac, owns Cadillac and runs Cadillac.  At no time was there an organization called “Cadillac” that had to petition to join GM.  It never was, is not, and never will be an independent entity.”

That’s also the case in Pittsburgh, according to the secessionists’ Web page. It seems that at no time was there an organization called ‘the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh
until General Convention created it in 1865 — before then, western Pennsylvania was part of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania:

The first known Episcopal clergy resident in this western third of what was then Diocese of Pennsylvania included:  Robert Ayres, a Methodist ordained in 1789, residing at Brownsville, Fayette County; Francis Reno, trained for the ministry by Presbyterians and ordained in 1791, residing at Woodville, Allegheny County; Joseph Doddridge, a Methodist ordained in 1792, residing in Independence, Washington County; and John Taylor, a Presbyterian ordained in 1794, who resided in Hanover Township, Washington County, before moving to Pittsburgh to teach school. 

First buildings of worship.  Rural log or stone houses for Episcopal worship were first built outside Pittsburgh in the late 1780’s and early 1790’s. The stone half of the Green Academy of Art in Carmichaels is the only remnant of that era.  In the decade 1805-1815, a second generation of parishes was organized and sanctuaries built, including Trinity Church, Pittsburgh (now the Cathedral) and Christ Church, Brownsville.  Land had been given or purchased for both these congregations in 1787 and 1796, respectively, but neither elected a vestry nor made any move to build until after the turn of the 19th century.

In the 1820’s, two Trinity, Pittsburgh rectors, William Thompson and John Henry Hopkins, became pioneer church planters in county seats like Butler and Greensburg.  Hopkins is credited with having launched seven new parishes.  He also established a residential school to train clergy in his own home, and by 1829 four of his first candidates had been ordained, with four more in process. 

The pace of parish development picked up after the 1830’s with the completion of the Pennsylvania Central Canal, which finally connected Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in 1840.  By the mid 1850’s, the two ends of the state were lined by railroads which greatly spurred industrial and population growth.  Many skilled English and Welsh workers came to staff its iron and steel mills and its glass plants, as well as to work the coal mines.  Development of Episcopal congregations, established in many of these new industrial locations, was speeded by the discovery of oil and natural gas.

Resistance/acceptance of a western diocese.  For a decade after 1810, Joseph Doddridge, pioneer missionary in our region, wrote letter after letter to the eastern bishops pleading with them to convince General Convention to establish a western diocese.  But conservative forces continued to guard oversight of entire states.  The first division finally was set up in 1838 in western New York, but no further divisions took place until the western third of Pennsylvania with its 24 counties became the Diocese of Pittsburgh in 1865. [Bold-faced emphasis added.]

So Jeffersonian, thanks for helping show that the Cadillac-GM analogy appears to be a strong one.

William Sulik [#16] writes:

Let’s suppose the executives in the Cadillac division decided they were now going to make hula hoops instead of luxury cars and told the workers they were going to have to retool.  The workers at the factories in most factories were good, obedient workerbees and did what they were told.  Sure most of the factories lost quite a few workers and sales were way down.  But the Caddy brass said “All was Well” and continued on.  Meanwhile workers in the Fresno, Pittsburgh, Ft. Worth factories (and a few other places) looked at their GM paychecks and their union contracts and the directives being issued by the GM Board of Directors and said, “By golly, we’re going to go on making cars and we’ll do it for GM directly if we can’t do it for Cadillac.”

The problem with your analogy is that it’s not the Cadillac-division execs who decided it was time to (supposedly) change the product line, it’s the GM board of directors. And that decision, my friend, is manifestly the province of the GM board.

To make your analogy more accurate, what +Duncan & Co. are doing is like the Cadillac division execs deciding they were going to separate from GM and continue to build 10-mpg gasoline-powered land battleships. The execs’ argument is that GM’s board of directors, in approving the desire of the Chevy division desire to experiment with other technologies (see the forthcoming Chevy Volt), had abandoned The Automotive Faith Once Delivered, which is that automobiles burn gasoline, dammit.

EXCEPT:

That TEC is supposedly NON-hierarchial.  In other words, it’s a franchise, where the franchise owners can choose to disaffiliate when they choose. 

More to the point, it is a confederation, not a federalist form of alliance. Power comes from the diocese UP, not from the PB DOWN.  And in a Confederation, individual ‘state’s CAN choose to seceed.

In His Peace
Jim Elliott <><

DCT, this immediately leads back to the same old problem about the origins of Anglican polity in the first place. If a diocese cannot secede, if a group of bishops cannot secede, then the Church of England could not have seceded. A strictly corporatist theory isn’t going to work; the best it can justify is legal seizure of real property. It is simply cannot have the kind of sacramental meaning that some want to apply to it.

And there is the continuing problem that the action against him is at best canonically questionable. The propriety of his expulsion relies upon 815’s authority to interpret the canons without challenge. One can, I suppose, take the corporatist view that since they run the corporation, they decide how the rules work. One would hope that a church could take a position with something more closely approaching moral integrity.

It’s very hard for me to look at all of this and not see politics, to avoid the conclusion that KJS and her fellows are pursuing their present course specifically to deprive the opposition of the advantages that legitimacy and property convey. They could, after all, call upon the HoB to preside over a less hostile division of the church; instead, they appear to prefer losing people to The Church altogether rather than afford anything to their opposition.

C. Wingate [#20] writes:

If a diocese cannot secede, if a group of bishops cannot secede, then the Church of England could not have seceded. A strictly corporatist theory isn’t going to work; the best it can justify is legal seizure of real property.

And there is the continuing problem that the action against him is at best canonically questionable. The propriety of his expulsion relies upon 815’s authority to interpret the canons without challenge.

When it comes to property, we have no choice but to acknowledge a brute fact:  all that matters is what the secular courts — which control the state’s monopoly on physical violence, at least in theory — and other national actors will do. The English bishops who backed Henry VIII were able to make their ‘secession’ stick only because they in turn were backed by the military might of the state.  If the bishops loyal to Rome had tried to claim ownership of their diocesan property, they likely would have parted not just with the property but with their heads, and of course some of them did just that.

As to the noncanonical deposition procedures, I’ve written at length elsewhere about how the ‘deposition’ of +Schofield was non-canonical and therefore (IMHO) null and void. The same reasoning applies to the ‘deposition’ of +Duncan.

I’ve also written elsewhere that what would happen under secular law, and what should happen, are not necessarily the same. See Property should go where it can best be used.

D.C.T.
So using your GM analogy, should the shareholders of TEC be allowed to sell their shares and make something off of their investment; or do they just give them to the company?