ECUSA Loses (Again) in Quincy; San Joaquin Seeks Review
by A S Haley, Anglican Ink:
[Note to new readers: You may be surprised at the degree of bias evident in this post, but I do not apologize. After eight years of participating in and writing about all of the matters collected under the links at this page, your Curmudgeon can no longer even try to appear neutral. The long and short of it is that the Episcopal Church (USA) is a bully, and is a bully with unlimited funds behind it. So it would be inhuman not to sound delighted when — now and again — it loses a case in court.]
Two of the four pending court cases involving realigning dioceses had further developments this week. In Illinois, the Episcopal Church’s protracted efforts to punish the Anglican Diocese of Quincy by freezing its bank accounts and suing for possession of its real property met with a resounding rebuff from the Fourth District Court of Appeals — for the second time in two years. In California, the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin has filed a petition with the California Supreme Court to review the inexplicably obtuse decision by the Court of Appeal in Fresno to stand by its clearly erroneous reading of California corporate law. (I will write more about the latter case in a separate post.)
As we saw earlier with the Illinois Court of Appeals, its decision yesterday is a model of clear and succinct reasoning. Anyone reading it will be able to follow what happened in the case. Briefly, the Episcopal Church (USA) and its Potemkin shell of a plaintiff diocese sued the Anglican Diocese for everything it owned, based on their claims of “hierarchy” and the permanent, irrevocable trust supposedly embodied in the Dennis Canon; they lost their case in the Adams County Circuit Court in Quincy, Illinois, as reported in this earlier post. They appealed to the Fourth District in Peoria, which affirmed Judge Ortbal’s thorough and thoughtful decision, as described in this post. Then they asked the Illinois Supreme Court for leave to appeal the case to that tribunal. In November 2014, it refused, so the decision by the Court of Appeals became final.
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