Christ Anglican Church, Savannah: Judicial Hardening for TEC & Christ Church Headed to SCOTUS

The historic Anglican Church, Christ Church, in Savannah, Georgia is taking its case to the U.S. Supreme Court over property ownership.  The consequences of divine judicial hardening, willful blindness, and harsh obstinacy continues to be evident as The Episcopal Church litigates for properties--in defense of their doctrinal deviations from the one true, holy, catholic and apostolic faith.  These are the consequences of decades of theological declensions in decisions, attitudes and pieties.  We wish Christ Church well. 

http://savannahnow.com/news/2012-03-23/christ-church-savannah-turns-us-court-property-flap#.T24XnhHpC8B

Christ Church Savannah turns to U.S. Court in property flap

Posted: March 23, 2012 - 12:10pm | Updated: March 24, 2012 - 12:23am

 

• Photos

Christ Church, located on Johnson Square.

Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News

By Jan Skutchsavannahnow.com Copyright 2012 Savannah Now. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

March 23, 2012 - 12:10pm

Christ Church Savannah turns to U.S. Court in property flap

 

Attorneys for Christ Church Savannah have filed documents asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in litigation they contend deprived them of the Johnson Square church property.

The 45-page document filed Thursday afternoon asks the high court to determine the law on local church property, which it contends has been inconsistently treated in five different jurisdictions considering the issue.

The supreme court may accept or reject the request for review.

The basic issue is whether a trust allegedly imposed on local church property in church documents must be treated as legally binding under court rulings and the First Amendment.

That is the key issue in the Georgia Supreme Court’s November ruling that the Johnson Square church and its property belong to the national Episcopal Church, not the local congregation under an earlier trust.

The latest action in the more than four-year-old dispute keeps alive the breakaway congregation’s hopes of retaking the historic property from Christ Church Episcopal.

Based on the November ruling, the Christ Church Savannah congregation agreed to return possession of the property at 28 Bull St. to Christ Church Episcopal, and that group returned to the structure Dec. 1.

The Anglican group, which has remained in the building during the ongoing legal dispute, relocated its worship to the Independent Presbyterian Church at 207 Bull St.

Meanwhile, the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia and Christ Church Episcopal filed a motion in Chatham County Superior Court asking that the Rev. Marcus Robertson and Christ Church Savannah be cited for contempt of that court’s orders involving church property.

Among the issues in that action, which remains pending before Judge Michael Karpf, is that the Anglican congregation has failed to relinquish the names “Christ Church Savannah” and “Mother Church of Georgia” despite three court rulings against them.

The Rev. Frank Logue, diocesan spokesman, said Friday that issues in that motion are being negotiated in an effort to resolve the motion “outside of court and to the court’s satisfaction.”

Christ Church Episcopal members left the church property on Johnson Square in a dispute over theology in 2007, then sued in Superior Court to regain the property. They asked the court to declare that all property of Christ Church was held in trust for the Episcopal Church.

Karpf, a three-judge panel of the state Court of Appeals and the state Supreme Court ruled with the Episcopal Church in the litigation.

Savannah attorney Patrick O’Connor, who participated in the filing, said Friday the local case joins two other petitions for review involving the same basic issues now before the Supreme Court.

“This points to the uncertainty of the law,” O’Connor said. “For that reason, we believe there is a very good chance the Supreme Court will agree to hear this case, and we think it should.”

Valdosta attorney Jim Elliott, the attorney for the Episcopal Diocese, said Friday he had not seen the petition and could not comment on the arguments it set forth.

“However, we have extreme confidence that the three courts that have already decided the merits have done do correctly and that the U.S. Supreme Court will also do so,” Elliott said.

Attorney Haley: Episcopal Churches and Jones v. Wolf, 443 U.S. 595 (1979)

Christ Church Anglican, Savannah, GA

H/T to A.S. Haley and Anglican Curmudgeon at http://accurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2012/03/christ-church-savannah-bishop-seabury.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AnglicanCurmudgeon+%28Anglican+Curmudgeon%29.  The TEC continues its legal spite and expenditures in courts.

Christ Church Savannah, Bishop Seabury File for Review in Supreme Court

In a well-coordinated move, Christ Church in Savannah, Georgia and Bishop Seabury parish in Groton, Connecticut have each filed a petition for review of the decisions in their respective cases by the United States Supreme Court. (More on the Christ Church filing is here.) They thus join Timberridge Presbytery of Atlanta in asking the high court to correct the wretched excesses wrought by ECUSA and PCUSA as a result of Justice Blackmun's fatuous dictum in Jones v. Wolf, 443 U.S. 595 (1979).

Both of those churches have a provision in their governing documents which purports to declare and impose a trust in their favor on the individual properties of each of thousands of their member parishes. Innocently continuing to maintain and contribute to the improvement of their church buildings, the congregations in those churches never realize that they do not really own their own property -- at least, not until they start to disagree with the drift of their denominations. Then, if they seek legal advice, they all too often find out that their national church has a chokehold on their properties: if they vote to leave, they cannot remain in their buildings, or keep any donated communion vessels, altar cloths or vestments.

In his majority opinion, after holding that Georgia courts constitutionally did not have to defer to church authorities regarding the ownership of parish property, Justice Blackmun invited churches with a national superstructure to modify their governing documents. He wrote: "Alternatively, the constitution of the general church can be made to recite an express trust in favor of the denominational church. The burden involved in taking such steps will be minimal." (443 U.S. at 606.)

To many State courts, this was taken as a pronouncement from on high that henceforth, national churches could bypass with a single stroke, and for all the parish properties in their jurisdiction, the various requirements that a legally recognizable trust could be established only in a written instrument, signed by the property owners themselves, i.e., the several parishes. Overlooked was Justice Blackmun's additional observation (emphasis added):

And the civil courts will be bound to give effect to the result indicated by the parties, provided it is embodied in some legally cognizable form.

Do you see the language I have bolded? In a legal sense, when a national church, through its legislative body, simply promulgates a rule or canon imposing a nationwide trust which the parishes are not told about, it is hard to understand how such a "result" may be said to embody the intent of both parties to the transaction -- namely, the church and each individual parish, acting as a settlor (creator) of the trust in favor of the national church. And yet State court after State court has held that it could imply the requisite consent to the imposition of such a trust, merely from the fact of the parish's membership in the larger organization as a whole, in which it "recognized" or "acceded to" the authority of the greater entity.

But no other body or organization -- religious or otherwise -- has been granted the privilege of creating enforceable trusts in such a unilateral fashion. This is the crux of the three petitions for review: how could a simple obiter dictum (a remark made as an aside, in the course of a decision) suddenly become the law of the land, sufficient to override all state and local laws to the contrary? That is not how the law is supposed to work, and if he were still alive, one would hope that Justice Blackmun would disavow any such intent behind his gratuitous statements.

For in practical effect, that result amounts to granting special State privileges to just one type of church. And that "establishment" of one type of church over all other types, and over all other kinds of property owners as well, quite plainly is contrary to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, as applied to the several States through the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The Supreme Court created the current mess of First Amendment law which has burgeoned in consequence of Justice Blackmun's dictum, and it will take the Supreme Court to clean it up. Later, as I have the chance, I will upload the petitions to a site where you may read them, and I will comment further on their arguments.

For now, we may take heart that the United States Supreme Court has three petitions in front of it, each of which raises the identical question for it to resolve.