Tragedy in South Carolina

(Lou Tarsitano comments on dispute over property in S C)

I agree with a dear friend that the situation in South Carolina, in which the bishop of the Episcopal diocese is attempting to take over All Saint’s Parish, which has joined the Anglican Mission in America, is a tragedy. I also fear that attempts to attribute blame are beside the point. Whether the Bishop of South Carolina were 100% right and All Saints' were 100% wrong, or vice versa, it would still be an error for the Diocese of South Carolina to pursue the property and control of All Saints' parish.

In 1789, when the American church was reorganized following the Revolution, it was the Scriptural, historical, and charitable decision of the uniting state churches that bishops should have spiritual, but not temporal authority in the Church in the United States (see Clara O. Loveland, "The Critical Years"). This principle was a solemn obligation among Episcopalians, and it took almost two centuries for honor and charity within the Episcopal Church to decay to the point that the Dennis Canon was pushed through a General Convention, more or less at the last minute, after the final edition of the official "Convention Daily" had been published.

One of our number asked why parishes did not rebel or remove themselves in 1979, in response to the Dennis Canon. Many of the traditional parishes were willing to give the Episcopal Church one more chance; many others simply did not believe that a church canon could nullify the civil deeds to their property. After all, in 1870, when Bishop Cummings led the Reformed Episcopal Church out of the then-PECUSA, efforts had been made to retain property for the national church, especially in Chicago, where Christ Church and its rector Dr. Cheney were sued. Christ Church won the right to retain its property, which it held by civil deed.

In response, the General Convention of that time added to the canons a section on the alienation of property. The same General Convention, however, also passed a resolution urging the several bishops and dioceses to seek civil title to property in their several states. The 1954 edition of the official commentary on the constitution and canons of the Episcopal Church, often known as White and Dykman, offered, with the sanction of the General Convention, the opinion that ecclesiastical law could go no further than the limits recognized in 1870, and that canon law was insufficient to secure property. Needless to say, the edition of the commentary published after Dennis in 1981, removed this information.

Thus, a great many Episcopalians, lay and clerical, simply did not believe that bishops and dioceses could claim property to which they held the civil deed or to impose an involuntary, retroactive trust upon them. This opinion is not very remarkable when one remembers that the Roman Church in the United States does not own property by canon, but by civil law. This matter was settled at turn of the 19th century, in what was called the Trusteeship Controversy. When the American courts refused to enforce Roman canon law, Roman canon law was changed to require that those entities joining the Roman Catholic Church in America must first deed their property civilly to the American Roman Church. Roman Catholic "hierarchy" as a model of Episcopalian "hierarchy" has always been a red herring, since the Roman Church acted, not on the basis of ecclesiastical hierarchy, but on the basis of American civil law (as the General Convention had proposed to the dioceses in the 1870s, although virtually all Episcopal dioceses failed to take these steps in civil law).

Then a strange thing happened. From 1976 on, the Episcopal Church began to divide into three main groups ( or "tendencies," if one prefers) that had nothing to do with "churchmanship," another red herring in these arguments, since terms like "catholic" or "evangelical" are meaningless in this context. One group, call them the "traditionalists," considered the replacement of historic formularies, along with their doctrine and order, beyond the authority of the General Convention. They could not accept the 1979 book as a valid prayer book or the ordination of women as a valid ministry. The second group, call them the "moderate liberals," agreed with the ordination of women, did not consider the formularies a fighting issue, and imposed a large measure of orthodoxy (apart from the matter of ordaining women) upon the weaker sections of the 1979 book. While liberal in its outlook, this group had no intention or desire to move beyond a moderate, honorable, albeit contemporary, reading of Scripture.

For the third group, the "radical liberals" or "revisionists," even the moderates' attachment to Scripture was an outrageous "fundamentalism," and the traditionalists' stand was actually a crime to be punished. The goal of the radicals was not merely to revise the life of the Church, but finally to re-invent human nature itself. This mania for re-invention has led to such distortions of reality as the consecration of Gene Robinson (a divorced man, who left his family to live with another man) and the desire to bless almost any form of sexual intercourse outside of Christian marriage.

What was strange was this--to a greater extent than anyone cares to admit, the moderate liberals joined with the revisionists in the punishment of the traditionalists. Moderates, with just as much to lose as the traditionalists in the end, testified against traditional parishes' ownership of their property. They encouraged the view that the bishop was no longer merely a sacramental overseer, but really the CEO of Episcopal, Inc., abandoning a positive obligation to the spiritual, rather than the temporal bishop. They helped to aggrandize the temporal authority of the bishops to the point that in the Accokeek case, the civil judge ruled that the Episcopal bishop in question had more power than any Church of England bishop or even the Bishop of Rome, since both the English and the Roman bishops have to answer to a higher standard than whim.

Years ago, in the 1980s, one of the moderate bishops accused me of disloyalty to the Episcopal Church for not accepting the General Convention's word on the Prayer Book and the ordination of women as final. I suggested that he and people like him were making a mistake since they were eliminating allies for the day when the General Convention inevitably acted against his and their conscience. He assured me that this would never happen. His name, however, was listed among those bishops who objected to the General Convention's approval of Robinson's election to New Hampshire. Also on the list was at least one other bishop that I know to have testified against a traditional parish's ownership of its property.

Unfortunately, the position of the moderates and their cooperation with the revisionists has come back to bite them. People who either agreed to or acquiesced in the position that traditionalists did not have a right to their witness or to their property are now asking, "But what about our witness? What about our property that our people have worked so hard to maintain?" And the answer, which they have too often helped to shape, is that the General Convention and the bishops loyal to it are the highest judicatory of the Episcopal Church and the rightful owners of all property connected with the Episcopal Church.

As a traditionalist, I have the highest esteem for Bishop Salmon, Bishop Murphy, and all involved, even though I would include them in the moderate liberal category, at least as far as the ordination of women is concerned. I love them as Christian brethren, even though I believe that they are in error on certain critical matters. What does upset me, however, is to see the moderates doing to one another what was done to the traditionalists. The ukase of the General Convention is not a higher authority than Christian charity or the historic ethos and obligations of the Episcopal way of life in America. A bishop is not required to behave, certainly not morally, as a landlord (which fact Bishop Murphy might also keep in mind when someone says no to him in conscience). A bishop is not required, certainly not morally, to enforce the Dennis Canon against the history and the agreed-to fellowship of the Anglican Way in America. Nor does our affection for one bishop or the other require us to make excessive claims, for one and against the other. None of us has to do the work of the revisionists against each other.

Moderation is often a good thing, although it can lose energy and become mere paralysis, so that we act out of habit and mistake habit for principle. The Episcopal Church has developed a number of nasty habits in the past 25 or 30 years, and not a one of them is worth preserving. American Anglicans within and without (often driven out) of the Episcopal Church are simply going to have to get out of the habit of being what the Episcopal Church has become in order to be Episcopalians again. The traditionalists are going to have to learn to talk to the moderates again, and the moderates are going to have to stop identifying with the coercive or dismissive ways of the revisionist mutual opposition, if we are ever to put together some sort of real fellowship and communion among Anglicans in our country once again, God being our helper.

So my prayers and the prayers of my parish go out to the brethren in South Carolina, not that God pick a winner and a loser, but that he lead us all to a better way of serving him and caring for each other.

Louis Tarsitano (tarsitano@bellsouth.net), St. Andrew's, Savannah