National Episcopal Church Seeks to Join Lawsuit to Seize Syracuse Parish

Monday, January 8, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Raymond J. Dague
315-422-2052
http://www.DagueLaw.com

Lawyers for The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Episcopal Church (often abbreviated ECUSA) served legal papers last Friday morning asking a state supreme court judge to allow them to intervene in an ongoing lawsuit seeking to seize St. Andrews Church in Syracuse, New York. The move came six months after the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York filed the lawsuit against St. Andrews to take the property from those who have worshiped in the local congregation since 1903.

St. Andrews and its priest, Fr. Robert Hackendorf, have successfully resisted the attempt by the diocese to take the parish through legal action, both last July and again last September. In September, the judge dismissed the part of the lawsuit where the diocese was suing individual members of the parish vestry, and also denied a request for a preliminary injunction against the local church. The lawsuit against the parish and the rector was allowed to continue. It is this lawsuit which the larger church corporation now seeks to join.

This move by ECUSA is the first such action against a local parish since the newly elected Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori took office in November of 2006. Early last year a similar attempt by ECUSA to intervene and assert claims against three parishes in the Los Angeles Diocese was dismissed by the trial court judge. Those cases are now on appeal.

Shortly before Bishop Schori took office last fall, David Beers, the principal lawyer for the presiding bishop, issued a stream of increasingly tough rhetoric directed at local parishes which resisted the move of the larger church body to ordain a homosexual bishop. This is the first time since the Los Angeles cases where ECUSA has resorted to suing local parishes.

“With more parishes leaving the Episcopal Church, it is widely expected by legal experts on both sides that ECUSA will be filing more lawsuits like this one,” said Raymond Dague, the attorney for St. Andrews. “I expect that they will be no more successful here than they were in the California litigation. Still, this is all very sad, because it reveals how mean-spirited the folks on the other side of this issue can be. This is a long way from how a church should behave.”

Bishop Schori and the parish are on opposite sides of a controversy over homosexual bishops and the authority of Scripture which has for years engulfed the Episcopal Church. St. Andrews adheres to the traditional teaching of the church that sex outside of marriage is prohibited by the Bible, while the Bishop and the leaders of the larger church have been outspoken supporters of the actively homosexual bishop of New Hampshire.

Over the last three and a half years, twenty-two of 38 primates of the World Wide Anglican Communion have declared broken or impaired communion with the Episcopal Church of the United States of America (ECUSA) because of this issue, and the vast majority of the Communion believes ECUSA has abandoned the faith and practice of Anglicanism as well as historic Christian teaching.