Here's another issue that occurred to me just now as I gave more thought to the parish budget that I reviewed the other day: what is the parish paying the ACA Diocese of the West and the Presiding Bishop? I know that once the parish left the Diocese of the West and went into the Patrimony of the Primate, it was not paying any diocesan assessment to the Patrimony and had stopped paying anything to the DOW. (I know that because I never wrote any checks for those expenses.) I didn't have access to earlier records of what the diocesan assessment for the DOW had been, although Fr Kelley did mention that it was "favorable".
I would bet good money that that's changed, and once Mrs Bush and the vicars general took over, St Mary's, with regular rental income and low expenses, started paying money to the ACA in a hurry. And probably big time. And since the DOW had fairly low expenses -- maybe six parishes for a bishop to visit, after all, and only occasional synods -- a lot of that money went straight to the ACA. How much? We don't know, and oddly a web search turns up very little hard information. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Scranton, PA says of parish assessments,
Some dioceses assess parishes at a rate up to 25% of their total income. The rate of assessment for parishes within the Diocese of Scranton is 9.5%. This rate has not been altered since 2006. It is only because of the success of the Diocesan Annual Appeal that the rate has been able to remain constant. The Diocese in itself generates very little income. It is dependent upon the parishes to provide the financial support required to continue the mission of the Church.In 2012, I took a careful look at the numbers of ACA parishes-in-good-standing and missions. The ACA doesn't have an official listing of which are which, but the best estimate I could make was that it had 25 parishes-in-good-standing and 43 missions. By the usual definition, a mission does not pay a diocesan assessment, and in more prosperous denominations even receives a subsidy -- that's probably not the case in the ACA. But what it means is that only 25 ACA parishes-in-good-standing, by the best estimate, pay any assessment at all to their dioceses, and of the dioceses, it's hard to know what sort of payments they make to the ACA.
But if the Diocese of Scranton is any indicator, 10% is a low estimate for how much St Mary's might be expected to pay. Based on a monthly rental income of $22,000, it would be paying about $2200 to the Diocese of the West, a substantial part of which would go to the ACA.
In fact, I would guess that St Mary of the Angels, at the time it went into the Patrimony of the Primate, must have been one of the very largest, and almost certainly the most prosperous. parish in the ACA. And that cash cow suddenly went away! Can there be any question why the ACA would try to seize the parish back?
And for that matter, can there be any question why the ACA will do everything it can to delay a final resolution at trial for the elected vestry's case against it? Every month of delay is $2200; every year of delay is $26,400. The longer my wife and I look at the record, the worse the ACA's case looks in Rector, Wardens, and Vestry v ACA -- I no longer put the vestry's chances at 50-50; I now think they're more like 70-30.
This means that at some point a year or two in the future, there's a good chance the ACA will not only lose its $2200 monthly income, which will create a big hole -- it will have to pay back $75,000 or more, plus interest. The ACA will have spent this money.
