Judge says defecting Episcopal congregation owns its property
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, August 16, 2005
A Superior Court judge in Orange County, Calif., ruled Monday that a congregation that defected from the Episcopal Church (USA) retains its property. The ruling was the final version of a tentative decision issued by Judge David C. Valesquez last week.
In today’s edition, the Los Angeles Times reported that J. Jon Bruno, bishop of the six-county diocese, said the denomination will appeal. John R. Shriner, the attorney for the diocese, called the ruling “a grave error,” the Times said.
St. James Church, which has property valued at several million dollars, defected from the Episcopal Church in a dispute over the denomination’s selection of a bishop after he had left his wife and children to live with his homosexual partner. The Episcopal Church claimed that the congregation forfeited any right to the buildings and other property, including hymnals.
The Episcopal Church, like the Presbyterian Church (USA), has a constitutional provision that says local congregations hold their property in trust for the denomination. They say those provisions give the denominations’ regional bodies – the dioceses and presbyteries – the right to evict the defectors and claim the property.
But California corporate law, according to a ruling in a Methodist case last year by the 5th Circuit of the California Court of Appeals, allows a local church to revoke the denominationally imposed trusts and retain its property.
Two Korean congregations whose majorities voted to leave the PCUSA – Serone Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles and First Presbyterian Church in Torrance – are currently involved in civil property disputes.
In the Serone case, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Yaffe has tentatively ruled that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is the owner of the property, but he has not ordered the eviction of the majority that voted to leave the denomination. Serone has appealed Yaffe’s ruling to the California Court of Appeals.
In the Torrance case, a Superior Court judge has granted access to the property by the minority, but he has not ruled on property ownership.
The Episcopal Church (USA) is also seeking to invoke its property trust clause in two other civil cases before Velasquez – All Saints Church in Long Beach and St. David’s Church in North Hollywood.
The Rev. Cannon David Canon, president of the conservative American Anglican Council, told the Times that Velasquez’s ruling “is a momentous verdict across the U.S. It gives great encouragement to Episcoplians and people of other Christian denominations that hold to the fact that the local congregation that buys the property and buildings does, in fact, own their property.” The council has helped Episcopal congregations that leave the denomination.
Velasquez said California courts are not bound by church law under the U.S. Supreme Court’s standard of applying “neutral principles of law” to resolve property disputes.
For more than 100 years, the Supreme Court’s rule for settling property disputes was to allow the denomination’s hierarchy carte blanche to take over property under the control of congregations that disagree with their denomination’s leadership. That ruling was made in 1869 in a Presbyterian case titled Watson v. Jones.
In 1979, however, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a Presbyterian case titled Jones v. Wolf, recommended that church property disputes be resolved through neutral principles of law that considered deeds, articles of incorporation and state statutes, as well as church law.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) and other “hierarchal” denominations – as both the Episcopal Church (USA) and the PCUSA have been described in civil litigation – have objected strenuously to the application of neutral principles. They have also appealed to the First Amendment as a basis for asking the courts not to intervene in property disputes.
But Velasquez’s ruling said the First Amendment applies as well to the defecting congregation because St. James exercised its free speech rights when it broke with the diocese, issued a press release declaring its defection and amended its articles of incorporation to eliminate any references to the diocese.
The Times quoted the judge as saying in his final written ruling, “Such acts arise out of and are in furtherance of the exercise of the right to speak on a matter of public interest. The views expressed by the defendants concern matters of public interest. How churches in America are reacting to the different viewpoints of homosexuality is currently a topic of much public significance.”
The Times also quoted the Rev. Praveen Bunyan, rector of St. James, and Eric C. Sohgren, the attorney for the congregation.
Bunyan said he was disappointed that the denomination plans to appeal Velasquez’s ruling. “I would wish that the Episcopal Church would say all right…. We want to be about God’s mission and be about God’s work.” Sohlgren charged that the diocese tried to “intimidate the church and take away its property so the members would have no place to worship.”