So what is it about St Mary's that led the ACA to sue to keep the parish, when it had let so many others go with little fuss? There are probably several reasons, none of them good, but the main one was expressed by ACA Presiding Bishop Marsh when asked just that question by a parishioner during his late-night visit to the siege: "it's about money." The ACA is collapsing, as we've been seeing here, along with the rest of the TAC. The ACA is running out of money -- it has about 25 parishes in good standing, which is to say, parishes that send tithes to their diocese. The other 40-odd are missions, which is to say, parishes that don't. That's not enough to fund junkets to the Greek islands or ecumenical trips to Florida. With the reputation the ACA has, there's little chance it will attract new parishes, either.
St Mary's occupies less than half of a parcel of prime real estate that it owns in Los Feliz, an affluent section of Hollywood. The rest of the parcel is occupied by a bank branch and a parking lot. The bank pays about $20,000 a month in rent; use of the parking lot after hours brings in another $1000 a month. Plate and pledge pale in comparison. Exactly what the property is worth is hard to say in this real estate market, but it's probably several million, with the impediment that the building is a historic landmark, so there are restrictions on what can be done with it.
Bishops Strawn and Marsh have never been completely clear on what they mean to do with their prize, assuming they win all the appeals. It's worth pointing out that they won most of the initial legal actions on the basis of their argument that the ACA's position on who controls the property is an ecclesiastical matter, and the US First Amendment prevents the courts from getting involved. Among other things, the court can't even rule on whether the ACA has followed its own canons over matters like removing vestry members -- and the ACA in fact has followed neither its own canons nor California law, but that basically doesn't matter as far as the court is concerned. By the same reasoning, of course, a church could declare someone a heretic and order him burned at the stake, and it could claim that was a First Amendment issue, too -- there's something wrong with the court's decision, in my view, but that may or may not ever be sorted out.
The ACA needs money. It needs money to fund its bishops, clearly: Bishop Marsh took retired Bishop Langberg on a couple of junkets in 2012, and I suspect this purchased Langberg's support in the House of Bishops at critical times. I also suspect that he'll need to bring money to the table in the merger talks that are ongoing with the Anglican Province of America -- I can't avoid the impression that the cruise to the Greek isles made by the head honchos of the two little splinter groups last May was basically flash. The ACA will have to be putting up more of this to seem in earnest.
That St Mary's is, or was, a parish, and indeed, a parish that had clearly expressed a wish no longer to be part of the ACA, has nothing to do with any of this. St Mary's is a source of ready money. As far as I can see, there are several paths to realizing this money: one strategy, which Bishop Strawn has already attempted at St Stephen's Athens TX, is to declare that the parish is a mission and simply take it over. At that point, the budget and the checkbook belong to him. St Stephen's was able to stop this by pointing out that this would violate the ACA canons and Texas law, suggesting that the parish's insurance would cover the costs of defending the case. Strawn backed off in Texas. The California court, on the other hand, has said it simply can't get involved, which would give Strawn, who has made it clear that he don't need no stinkin' canons, a free hand.
Another strategy would be simply to sell the parish property. Potential obstacles would include the building's status as a historic landmark and the possibility that the transaction might bring further attention from the authorities -- depending on how far Strawn, Marsh, Morello, and their stooges bend the rules, we could be getting into a criminal conspiracy. Marsh has told me in an e-mail that "we have no current plans to sell the property", but this means nothing. A potential buyer that would provide the least complication would be the Church of Scientology, which has been picking up Hollywood properties for years and which would probably maintain the building as something like a church. St Mary's would then wind up its corporate business and transfer the proceeds to a deserving non-profit like, oh, say, the Anglican Church in America, the Most Rev Brian Marsh, proprietor. The vestry having long since been packed with compliant stooges, there'd be no problem in doing this.
A thief can get off on a technicality, but that doesn't mean he isn't a thief. A theft can go undetected, but that doesn't mean it's not stealing. The clerics who seem to be mooting transactions like these are utterly corrupt. The clerics who support them in the ACA and the TAC, as well as the Standing Committees who tolerate this conduct, are complicit. This thing smells. It's not just Morello, Strawn, and Marsh who will have this to deal with in this life and in the hereafter.
It's worth pointing out, though, that from what we've already seen, Strawn and Morello are simply incompetent. Pulling off this kind of heist is almost certainly beyond them. Brian Marsh is basically a high school drama teacher, and I don't think he's equipped for the kind of mission they have in mind, either. We'll see what develops, but I strongly suspect that in the end, the ACA will get very little for its efforts, although the future for St Mary's as a parish has already been destroyed.
I'll be out of town on family business for the rest of the week; I won't be posting until I get back.
