Applying what they referred to as a “neutral principles of law,” the Texas Supreme Court Friday decided what was, in effect, an ecclesiastical dispute: that The Episcopal Church can no longer lay claim to the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.
The decision authored by Justice Eva Guzman overturns a ruling by the Second Court of Appeals, and awards $100 million in church property to a doctrinally conservative faction that withdrew from the national church more than a decade ago.
Justice Jane Bland did not participate in the decision and there was no dissent.
The dispute involves putative control of a corporation that held title to more than 50 church properties in trust for the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth and its various congregations. The central question, as Guzman notes in Friday’s opinion, is the identity of the diocese itself: Who is the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth? The national organization known as The Episcopal Church (TEC)? Or the departing congregants who voted to leave and now identify themselves as The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth?
In Friday’s 30-page opinion, they stuck with their own doctrinal constant: the four corners of the corporate documents.
“The Fort Worth Diocese’s identity depends on what its documents say,” Guzman wrote.
This was the court’s second review of the dispute, and the second time the court has overruled a lower court. In 2013, the justice set aside a summary judgment by the trial court that had deferred the matter in favor of the national organization as a doctrinal matter. The Supreme Court remanded the matter to be decided, not as a church controversy, but as a secular real estate dispute governed by “neutral principles” of Texas corporate law.
Once returned, the trial court again granted summary judgment, this time in favor of the departing congregants. On appeal, the Second Court of Appeals overturned the summary judgment ruling, in effect, that the hierarchy of The Episcopal Church had the right, on doctrinal grounds, to remove church dissidents from the corporation that owned the property in trust. It was that conclusion that the Supreme Court disputes.
The case, styled The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth v. The Episcopal Church, evolved from a series of legal and ecclesiastical maneuvers in 2006 designed to facilitate a split by the Fort Worth diocese from the national church, which coincided with the elevation of a woman as church leader.
Established in 1789 in a Revolutionary Era split with the Church of England, The Episcopal Church was formally established in Texas during its days as a republic and thrived across the state, nowhere more than in Dallas. In 1982, the overwhelming size of the Episcopal Diocese led to the creation of a new western diocese in Fort Worth. And as part of its creation, the Dallas diocese granted the new entity control of church-owned properties within its boundaries.
The Texas Constitution barred unincorporated associations like churches from owning property outright. As a result, church property was routinely governed by corporations that held the property through trusts that implied the benefits of ownership. And in 1983, the new diocese created the Corporation of the Diocese of Fort Worth to do just that.
But as in other well-established faiths, the following decades brought new pressures to deal with widespread social change. For the New York-based Episcopal organization those ecclesiastical disagreements erupted into full-blown schism with the 2006 election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as Presiding Bishop, a liberal doctrinal reformer and the first woman to serve as Primate of The Episcopal Church.
And as frictions arose between factions within the new Fort Worth Diocese, the properties became the currency of the deeper, ecclesiastical schism. And in 2006, having long threatened to secede, conservative traditionalists in Fort Worth joined a handful of dioceses in California, Pennsylvania and Illinois to execute a series of well-planned structural and procedural maneuvers aimed at realigning them with their Church of England roots.
Under its conservative bishop, John Iker, the Episcopal separatists voted as a majority to change the governance of the trust that controlled the properties, removing all references to its original owners, including The Episcopal Church. When the faction declared themselves separate, The Episcopal Church responded; Iker renounced his role as bishop and The Episcopal Church vacated all the various diocesan offices and trustees, replacing them with loyalist appointees and declaring the earlier corporate changes null and void. They also sued the group that now identified itself as The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.
At oral arguments in December, The Episcopal Church was represented by Tom Leatherbury of Vinson & Elkins and The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth was represented by Scott Brister, a former justice on the court.
At the time, the court seemed reluctant to involve itself. Barely had Brister begun his argument when he was interrupted by Justice Jimmy Blacklock, who all but begged the parties to make it go away.
“Is there no one to whom both sides can go – someone with standing in the eyes of both groups to decide this in Christian love and charity – instead of under the cold hard rules of the law we’re obliged to follow here?” he asked.
But Friday’s ruling reflects no such reluctance. The court maintains that The Episcopal Church had every right to determine which members of the church were in good standing, but that nothing in the corporate bylaws allowed them to make changes in the diocesan corporation that owned the property based on their standing.
Guzman cited a series of changes by the church and its former diocese that precluded its later intervention. In 1979, The Episcopal Church passed the so-called “Dennis Canon” which sought to impose a trust on all church properties for the benefit of The Episcopal Church. However, the original incorporation of the Fort Worth diocesan only required the entity to remain consistent with the canons of the diocese “as they now exist or hereafter be amended.” And in 1989, the diocese expressly repudiated the Dennis Canon.
The Episcopal Church had argued that because of its hierarchical structure, members of the diocese could not vote against the ecclesiastical tenets of the church and remain in good standing. But in her opinion, Guzman noted that under its charter, a majority of the Fort Worth communicants in convention elected the trustees of the diocesan corporation.
“In sum,” wrote Guzman, “TEC’s determinations as to which faction is the true diocese loyal to the church and which congregants are in good standing are ecclesiastical determinations to which the courts must defer. But applying neutral principles to the organizational documents, the question of property ownership is not entwined with or settled by those determinations.”
Justice Guzman’s opinion can be found here: