Friday, May 15, 2009
We have late-breaking news that the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church has authorized filing yet more lawsuits - this time against the Bishop of Pittsburgh, the Rt. Rev'd Bob Duncan and the leadership, and all the local churches who voted to leave The Episcopal Church and affiliate with the Anglican Diocese of the Southern Cone.
The purpose of the lawsuit is to sieze all of the property of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, as well as all the churches that voted to separate under the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh. The Presiding Bishop's attorneys seek to remove the authority of the bishop and the local churches over their own property and church homes and turn it all over to the shadow diocese specifically setup by the PB's office for this purpose. You can read the freshly minted lawsuit here.
Apparently, they want it all - all of it, they seek to expel everyone out of their church homes, even the children from their Sunday Schools, and confiscate the churches and diocesan offices. It's astonishing.
They are demanding an accounting for every single item in the diocese, right down to the children's own crayons and then they seek to take over everything for themselves, every single bit of it, and by doing so, throw the children into the streets.
No, we're not kidding. Where do you think they're going to go?
This same type of lawsuit was one of the first threats in Virginia as well, but the court ruled in Virginia that there could be no judgment of the properties until after the trials were all over. Currently, the Virginia properties have been ruled by the court to go to the congregations where they are held in trust, but that is now being appealed by the Episcopal Church to the Virginia Supreme Court. In California, the Bishop of Los Angeles (seen yesterday promoting the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in his backyard of Anaheim) has sued the leadership of St. James Church in Newport Beach personally to recover his own litigation fees for the lawsuits he initiated. In Central New York an entire congregation and their clergy were forced from their church home and that church now remains vacant. Just what does the Presiding Bishop expect to do with all the property if the judge rules that she can take it all over through her surrogates? Doesn't she have enough crayons all ready?
The URL for this story is:
http://babybluecafe.blogspot.com/2009/05/episcopal-church-files-yet-another.html
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