OXFORD, OHIO — The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States has said that a Virginia court ruling in favor of 11 breakaway churches that want to keep church property is a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution, which guarantees the separation of Church and State.
The court ruled on April 3 that the Virginia congregations that broke away are covered by a state law written during the U.S. Civil War era. The statute says that any congregation that “divides” remains under the control of the majority, as does property entrusted to it.
In a statement, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said if the statute means what the court held, “it plainly deprives the Episcopal Church and the Diocese, as well as all hierarchical churches, of their historic constitutional rights to structure their polity free from governmental interference and thus violates the First Amendment and cannot be enforced.”
The court has still to rule on the property issues themselves, or whether the Virginia statute violates the Episcopal Church’s or the state of Virginia diocese’s First Amendment rights.
The Episcopal Church has suffered internal struggles in recent years over issues including women’s roles in leadership and the installation of an openly gay bishop in 2003.
The 11 congregations voted in 2006 and 2007 to leave the Episcopal Church and realign as a newly-founded Anglican District of Virginia under a network led by Anglican bishops in Africa. That led the denomination to sue the congregations in an effort to regain control of church property.
The 2.4 million-member Episcopal Church claims that all church property belongs to it and that when a congregation switches allegiance, the property is merely “abandoned.”
The Rev. Jim Oakes, vice chairperson of the Anglican district, told reporters, “We have maintained all along that the Episcopal Church and Diocese of Virginia had no legal right to our property because the [Virginia] law says that the majority of the church is entitled to its property when there is a division within the denomination.”
The law cited by the court was adopted in 1867 in response to churches that split following the 1861-1865 U.S. Civil War.
