We've seen it in numerous dioceses including the DCNY. It's a routine that would be ineffective except that there are priests all over who are convinced that they, their parish and their bishop are the exceptions. It has recently happened that a parish in the Northeast that was negotiating with their bishop now expects to be sued shortly. This is how the pecusa good cop/bad cop routine works:
A priest and vestry meet with their pecusa bishop. Their pecusa bishop is liberal, but a nice liberal. He (it's usually a he) says that he will be in conversation with the parish that wants to leave pecusa. He invites the parish to make an offer for the purchase of their properties. After the parish makes an offer a funny thing happens - the bishop doesn't accept the offer and doesn't make a counter-offer. Somewhere in this process, the bishop or the chancellor asks the parish to turn over the deeds to their properties. The parish's legal counsel speaks up at this point and says that this would be a mistake. The supposed negotiations with the diocese break down at this juncture. The request for a new offer is generally made more than once by the diocese without the diocese ever offering a counter-offer. At some point the chancellor steps in and threatens the parish with a lawsuit. If the parish doesn't blink a lawsuit is filed and then it's on to court.
Our parish decided early in the game that the bishop of the DCNY could not be trusted and that after we made an offer we would not make another one until we received a counter-offer from the diocese. There never was a counter-offer and so we had reason to believe that our initial instincts were correct - we could not trust the bishop of the DCNY. We also weren't going to be negotiating against ourselves by sweetening our offer.
We also determined that we would not enter into a lawsuit for our properties. The New Testament is clear that Christians should not be suing Christians in secular court. That the DCNY was incapable of acting in a Christian manner did not give us license to act in a non-Christian manner. We left our buildings and resettled elsewhere. We were clear from the onset that there was no good cop/bad cop routine, only a bad cop disguised as a good cop and another bad cop.
No comments:
Post a Comment