Who Keeps the Keys?
Time magazine's ever-on-top-of-things David Van Biema has a helpful explainer on Friday's ruling in the Virginia Episcopal Church property lawsuit.
(In case you missed it, a Virginia judge ruled that a Civil War-ear statute applies in the case involving 10 breakaway churches. The statute essentially says that when a church is split, the majority gets to keep the property. The Episcopal Church obviously disagrees, saying the property belongs to the national church, not the local parish.)
As a sizeable minority of conservative congregations leaves Episcopalianism, the struggle over who gets hundreds of millions of dollars of church property is becoming more and more intense. Passions range so high that the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the head of the
national Episcopal body, in effect indicated during discovery in the Virginia case that she would rather see the churches sold and deconsecrated for secular purposes than passed on to the departing congregations.
posted by Eckstrom at
12:34 PM
1 Comments:
One of the problems with this law is that it makes an end-run around the rules and by-laws that govern denominations, local jurisdictions, and their congregations. In order to seize church property, all a break-away clergyperson or lay leader need do is get a majority of congregants - long-standing members or new like-minded folk - to convince a (not theologically-trained) judge to declare that a so-called "division" has occurred between themselves and their denomination. This totally disregards church order and the right of private organizations - in this case, a private religious organization - to regulate themselves without government interference.
How ironic that conservatives are calling on the government to meddle in a dispute within a private religious organization. Isn't that the kind of Big Government interference conservatives usually reject and decry as un-American?
4/07/2008 01:07:00 PM
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