On The Phrase "Protestant Reformed Church"

Lord Hugh Cecil was one of the leading laymen of the Church of England in his time, ative in all matters legal whether in Parliament or Synod. A bill was introduced in Parliament, one not important in itself, which repeatedly refered to the Church of England as the "Protestant Reformed Church". Lord Halifax like his famous layman father was an Anglo-Catholic and of course did not like such a wording, and proposed to Lord Hugh that the phrase be changed to "the Church of England by law established". Lord Hugh answered that he could "agree that is a jejune description of your religious society to announce that you disagree with someone else, and were once worse than you are now."

Armistice in Ottawa

The first Canadian settlement between ACoC and ANiC has been approved, as the two Ottawa ANiC parishes have ratified the agreed settlement with the diocese. ANiC's press release is here; the diocese's news release is here

The settlement conforms to the template that I have been saying for some time would work in a diocese in which more than one parish has left. One ANiC parish keeps its building; the other one leaves it. The one that keeps its building pays the diocese "a substantial sum of money". Meanwhile ANiC states that "By agreement, precise details of the division of assets between the parishes and diocese are to remain confidential." What that means, we may infer, is that the diocese will pay out some money to St. Alban's, which will provide a nice start to their building fund. The diocese's insistence on a confidentiality agreement conforms with what has been suggested to me by a lawyer friend with reason to know how a rational diocese might approach a situation like this. A diocese would not want it to be known that it is paying out money to a departing parish, so it would insist on a confidentiality agreement, so that the settlement may be described in a way that obscures the fact of such a payment. That is why a multi-parish settlement can be easier than a single-parish ones; the financial implications can be blurred so that ACoC is not seen to be doing anything that might amount to a significant concession to ANiC.

A fillip I didn't think of is that the departing congregations have been required to change their names. This might seem to be rather unnecessarily ruthless of the diocese, but it allows the diocese to maintain its formal position. The parish of St. George's has not left the diocese; rather it has been disestablished, and its building sold to a worshipping group with a different name. St Alban's parish has not left; rather its clergy have left, apparently starting some sectarian congregation with a different name, worshipping in a different building. Anglican worship carries on in the same building, with all present St. Alban's members invited to continue worshipping there. (Where they will find a congregation for the "continuing" ACoC St. Alban's is another question, but one to worry about another day.) By returning Anglican Social Services to the building, the diocese maintains the pretext that it wants it because it has use of it.

It's important that things are set up so that both sides may maintain their formal position about the dispute, to validate their narrative. Most of us normal people, upon finalizing such a settlement, would thank God and move on. But there are always some ditchers, particularly in a group of people with strong beliefs like ANiC, who are insistent on carrying on the fighting and demonstrating to all that they won the settlement. Thus Kate Sanderson, at the always-irresponsible Anglican Essentials blog, insists that the by settling the diocese acknowledged that St. Alban's had the right to their building, which it does not, as if anyone with any sense cares now. (She also risks breaking the confidentiality agreement by claiming that the percentage asset division in the settlement: 40/60 ANiC/ACoC if you want to know. So much for an agreement about confidentiality with ANiC!)

Even without knowing the amounts of the monies being exchanged, it may safely be judged that both sides are better off than if they had been engaged in a lawsuit since the time the congregations left. +Chapman deserves credit for acting as a faithful steward of that which was entrusted to him, avoiding the needless squandering of hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

Could others follow the example of this settlement? The problem is finding a rational ACoC diocese. In New Westminster it's rather late, and neither side would seem likely to surrender possession of St. John's Shaughnessy voluntarily in any case, while a sensible settlement would involve selling it and splitting the proceeds. In Niagara the sensible thing would be to sell Good Shepherd (which would be a prudent move anyway) and divide the spoils, and then split ownership of the other two properties . But +Niagara does not seem to view the situation rationally anyway; the lawsuit is already well under way so hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees have already been squandered; and the provocative presence of Charlie Masters+ in the diocese inhibits any settlement -- particularly one in which he retains his building.

The Legion of Decency -- The Ascent

A question that consumes me: how much influence did Christian values, in either a genuine or secularized form, have over mass media in, say, the period between 1910-1960, and when, why, where and how did they lose it?
One estimable organization that I knew very little about is the Legion of Decency , the Roman Catholic organization that policed Hollywood through its classification system, its ultimate weapon being the "C" rating, C standing for "Condemned".
Like most everyone else brought up in this culture, I grew up sneering at the film industry's voluntary self-policing through the Hays code. It does seem rather harsh in retrospect that until 1961, a female navel had never been seen in a major-studio American picture (the groundbreaker being Christine Kauffman in Town Without Pity.) But the briefest glance at the culture today reveals that something has gone horribly wrong; perhaps we should have a little more respect for the work of those who acted as salt, delaying the putrefaction of the culture by some decades.
I've been reading James M, Skinner's The Cross and the Cinema (London: Praeger, 1993) on the L of D. I never realized how much influence the Legion had on film content. In the early 1930s Catholics began to come to the judgment that Joe Breen's administration of the Production Code was insufficient to protect American morals. Example: in 1934 Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia told Catholics to stay away from all theatres in the city entirely "not merely as a counsel but a positive command, binding all in conscience under pain of sin." (35) Box office receipts fell by 40%. Catholics began to think of forming a national policing organization with the full weight of the hierarchy behind it. By adopting a uniform stance across the country, the Church could wield more influence on the studios. Then an organization could go beyond merely classifying and condemning to encouraging studios to make changes to films to avoid full condemnation, thereby achieving actual improvement in the moral quality of films. (In addition, overuse of outright condemnation raised the possibility of Catholics ceasing to follow the Legion's lead, a deadly danger always kept in mind).
The early Legion was not interested in the quality of entertainment, but in morality pure and simple. Seduction and adultery were never be depicted favourably, and ideally not depicted at all. Divorce was never to be depicted as the best solution. The Legion was also on the lookout for more dubious targets such as wise-cracking career girls refusing to display feminine decorum.
I will pass over discussing the Legion's effectiveness by deeming it very effective. When a bishop directed all his parish priests to declare from the pulpit that anyone viewing a film committed a mortal sin, or threatened that any theatre showing a condemned film would be boycotted for one year after its exhibition, results followed.
The question of interest is -- why did the Legion fail in its task so dramatically in the 1960s?? Did Catholics stop following its dictates? Did post-Vatican II liberalism subvert the Church's purpose and will? Did the force of the sexual revolution simply overwhelm the Legion -- it would be hard, after all, to persuade the faithful to avoid 90% of the films Hollywood makes?
As we will see, the Legion was undermined in the 50s by authoritative pronouncements by two very powerful bodies. One, unsurprisingly, was the United States Supreme Court. The other, very surprisingly, was none other than Pope Pius XII.

Calvin and Baillie Circus

It appears that the Anglicans and Roman Catholics have nothing on the Presbyterians when it comes to liturgical ridiculity, paganism...and most important of all, liturgical puppets. And this isn't from some backwater church or a gathering of the church's Green gay-friendly feminist faction. This is from the opening ceremony of their General Assembly:
Perhaps YouTube commenter Throbert McGee said it all on this one:
"Pretty cool video, except it cuts off before the gory climax where they pour live bees on Nicholas Cage's face and then set him on fire... "
Lots of highlights in this one...the swirling "liturgical dance" straight out of the seventies, the giant Idol God with the mutant arms, the guy with a red T-shirt symbolizing nothing in particular tiredly waving his pennant, the skunks (Presbyterianism's answer to incense?), the embarrased looking adults leaders looking like delegates at some 4th-rate international conference, the dazed and imbecilic expressions on the faces of the kids....
Even beyond the offensive paganism of the display, I am impressed by its pure stupidity: can there be even one person with a triple-digit IQ, even one person of any aesthetic sense, who can find this, taken seriously, as anything but an abomination. Modern Liberal protestantism, despite its egotistical claims to be so much smarter than those snake-handling fundamentalists, is a stupid religion, pure and symbol, and does not appeal to intelligent people, as you can determine for yourself by reading anything written by its leaders.

Burke on Preachers and Politics

Preachers who talk about politics know less about the subject that they do about the subjects in which they were trained. Their uninformed opinionating on the subject can only make you wonder why you should trust what they say about God when they are willing to discourse from the same pulpit about matters about which they know little.

Edmund Burke puts it in 18th-century style:

...politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement....The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.

(Reflections on the Revolution in France, Library of Liberal Arts edition, at 13)

A Lenten Prayer: The Litany of Humility

Litany of Humility

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being honored, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being praised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being approved, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being despised, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being calumniated, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being ridiculed, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being wronged, Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being suspected, Deliver me, Jesus.

That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be chosen and I set aside, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised and I unnoticed, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be preferred to me in everything, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

-- Rafael Cardinal Merry Del Val

The Strange Death of the Original-Principles Trust (Pt 2)

Kelleher J.’s approach is to treat the application of the neutral principles of law, which is step one of the process, as both beginning and end of it. The cases he cites in support of his approach are all irrelevant to the case at hand. Two cases are cited in support of the proposition that questions of church doctrine are inappropriate subjects for judicial determination. Kelleher J. notes in particular that one of these cases referred approvingly to the U. S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking 1979 decision in Jones v. Wolf (8). However it is not necessary to look to cases relying on American constitutional law in support of the doctrine that Anglo-Canadian courts ordinarily refrain from determining issues of church doctrine. That also is a centuries-old common-law doctrine, and the inquiry into fundamental original doctrines is a carefully carved out exception to it, as Professor Ogilvie explains in her text. Kelleher J. further cites Protection of the Holy Virgin Russian Orthodox Church (9), where the Quebec Court of Appeal declined a request for a declaration that to be a member of the parish, a person must observe the teachings of the church. There was no trust argument in that case so the refusal of the court to get involved in matters of doctrine has no relevance here. The portion of the trial court decision cited an Ontario Court of Appeal decision in Balkou v. Gouleff (11). In that case the court was asked to determine whether church doctrine forbade membership in Communist organizations. Again, this is not a church property case and has no bearing on the fundamental-principle doctrine.

The oddest citation in support of this approach comes in paragraph 252, where Kelleher J. cites a statement by Burton J.A. in Itter v. Howe (1896)(12) in support of the proposition that “[t]he notion of civil courts deferring to ecclesiastical authority on questions of doctrine has deep provenance in Canada.” As a refutation of the fundamental-principles doctrine, this reference is negated more than adequately by Kelleher J. himself in paragraphs 268 and 269, where he discusses the case and demonstrates that the fundamental-principle rule was applied in it. The dissidents lost in Itter v. Howe, but the principle itself was recognized --as it always has been until Bentley v. New Westminster was released.

The other argument Kelleher J. uses is that trust doctrine does not apply in the case of a hierarchical church such as the Anglican Church, which was an elaborate and complicated set of rules, procedures, and authorities. This appears to be an acceptance of the defendants’ novel argument, also derivative of American categorizations, that the trust doctrine applies only in congregational churches, and not hierarchical ones. I have not been able to find any case law cited by either Kelleher J. or the defendants in support of this proposition; I believe none exists. The doctrine has always applied to hierarchical and non-hierarchical churches; to churches with elaborately constructed internal mechanisms and those with no written statements of doctrine at all. The analysis has been applied to eastern Orthodox churches which are more hierarchical than the Anglican Church. It has been applied to the Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1830s, a hierarchical church within the legal meaning of the term and one with a more detailed and precise set of rules and internal procedures than Anglicans have. There is no basis for this argument in either precedent or logic; the ill that the fundamental-principles doctrine attempts to remedy is the same whether the abandonment has occurred by an arbitrary decision in a single congregation with no written doctrinal statement or a thoroughly debated decision in a denomination with 500 pages of constitution and canons.

What would impel Kelleher J. to reject the existing doctrine so brazenly? I want to discuss this because orthodox Christians succumb all too easily to the temptation, and I use the word literally, to attribute all adverse judicial decisions to the implacable hostility of the secular world and its rejection of the truth in Christ. It must be acknowledged that in any case where judicial bias, open or covert, influences a decision, the probability is great that the relevant bias will be against orthodox Christianity. However in Bentley the possibility that the adverse decision was actuated by bias can be completely dismissed. A companion issue in the case involved the disposition of the Chun bequest, a $2.2 million building fund claimed by both a dissenting and a successor ACoC congregation. Without discussing the trust issues there, it may be said that the choice of beneficiary was something close to an act of pure equitable discretion. The departing ACNA congregation was awarded control of the Chun bequest. It is impossible that a judge motivated by hostility to orthodox doctrine would have made that decision.

The reason that the place of the fundamental-principles doctrine could be seen in advance of this litigation to be somewhat precarious is that it has an archaic air to it. Aspects of it seem to belong to a bygone age, to a time when any educated English gentleman, of whatever religious belief, who might find himself on the bench could be expected to know the basic doctrines of not only the Church of England but the major sectarian groups (and even of “Papists”, as they were described in one of the major early House of Lords precedents). Like the law lords in the case marking the high water mark of the doctrine, Free Church of Scotland v. Overtoun (13) (see Wikipedia entry), a judge could be expected to engage in learned discussion on the degree of significance of an alteration of the doctrine of double predestination by the adoption of the statement that “God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” In a post-Christian age, we cannot expect judges to bring with them that kind of expertise. Nor are Christian churches the only religious institutions to which the doctrine applies. In the English case of Varsani v Jesani , a Hindu sect’s founder was believed to be the incarnation of the Supreme Being, and a division arose over the extent to which his successor also enjoyed divine status. Carnwith J. was faced with the task of determining which faction (if either) had deviated from the sect’s original fundamental principles, in a sect with no written doctrinal statement that could be adverted to. Understandably, he balked, and found a solution in a statutory scheme that allowed division of properties between the factions. There is no equivalent statutory provision in Canada, so a judge here would have to make that challenging factual determination.

The necessary entanglement of the state in church affairs of the fundamental-doctrines rule leads activist judges to look for some way to extinguish it. The strength of this sentiment may be seem from the reaction to the decision by Don Hutchinson, general legal counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC). It is churches like EFC members who derive the most benefit from a doctrine protecting established orthodoxy. Despite this, Hutchinson said “he found it appropriate that Justice Kelleher "respected the religious freedom of the Anglican communion" by allowing internal Anglican processes to resolve internal Anglican disputes. "We don't want the courts or government making final decisions on the beliefs, practice and polity of a church."

So far so good as to the chances of a successful appeal by the ANiC churches, who at the time of writing are in a discernment process to determine whether they should appeal. (A notice of appeal has been filed to meet the deadline.) However, as we shall subsequently see, the situation gets much stickier when we look at ANiC's ability to show that the ACoC has indeed violated the original principles doctrine as the coirts have applied it.

NOTES

(8) (1979), 443 U.S. 595, 1979 U.S. LEXIS 16
(9) (1st ed., at 209).
(10) [2001] O.J. No. 438 (S.C.); varied 2002 CanLII 3570 (ON C.A.), 30 B.L.R. (3d) 315, 167 O.A.C. 138
(11) (1989) 68 O.R. (2d) 574.
(12) (1896), 23 O.A.R. 256, [1896] O.J. No. 31 (QL) (C.A.)
(13) [1904] AC 515 (H.L.)