Impeccable Logis

From the article posted below:

The breakaway parishes ought to win every facet of the lawsuit not because their beliefs or their politics are better, but because both law and equity, along with common sense, are on their side. Not only does Virginia state law (the Division Statute) explicitly apply to just such a situation as now exists, but the history especially of The Falls Church argues against the claims of the Virginia Diocese with which they have disassociated.

First, The Falls Church was founded, formed, and developed long before the diocese, or the national Episcopal Church, even existed. Title to the land and buildings is held by the individual churches' trustees, not by the diocese. These churches (and others) helped create the diocese, not vice versa. And, to the tune of many, many millions of dollars, these churches have supported the diocese financially, not taken from the diocese. The very same sets of parishioners who voted so overwhelmingly to leave the Episcopal Church are the ones who on their own, without diocesan help, raised the vast sums of money needed to expand, improve, modernize and beautify their church properties. Why the diocese should be able, despite all those facts, to swoop in and claim the land and buildings (to be peopled by whom, one wonders?) out from under the parishioners who paid for and nurtured them is a question that surpasseth human understanding.

Boiled down to their essence, the Episcopal Church arguments against this are twofold -- and nonsense twice over. First, the Episcopal Church will raise a federal First Amendment (free exercise of religion) issue, saying in effect that the state has no say over the internal laws of an organized Church. Because the organized Church (in other words, the institutional structure, the bureaucracy of the Diocese of Virginia and the U.S. Episcopal Church) has bylaws that claim corporate ownership of all individual churches' parish property, the state supposedly must uphold those bylaws despite any claims, evidence, or history to the contrary. Second, they will argue that "hierarchical" churches (e.g., Episcopal, Catholic), unlike "congregational" churches (e.g. United Church of Christ), are indivisible without the assent of the whole body (in this case, the diocese) -- much the same way that Lincoln argued that the Union was indivisible.

Of course, their arguments fail the smell test, because a civic polity and a religious one are two entirely different things. At issue in the lawsuit are civic property rights, which are always governed by the state, not the spiritual matters that are exclusively (and rightly) the province of churches alone.