The attorneys for Mrs Bush and the ACA, Messrs Lancaster and Anastasia, did on the other hand make an opening statement. Their strategy appears to be threefold:
- Insist that the August 6, 2012 vote by the parish to dissociate from the ACA was invalid due to insufficient notice to Mrs Bush of vestry meetings at which the vote was planned. Their position appears to be that this was based on an effort to exclude Mrs Bush from the vestry.
- In case this doesn't work, to claim that of 66 potential parishioners who could have received ballots in the August 6, 2012 vote, 7 were improperly excluded from the eligible voter list, although of the 7, 4 had become Catholic (and therefore had ceased to be members in good standing of the Anglican parish), 2 had been absent for extended periods as specified in the bylaws, and one was deceased.
- In case this doesn't work, to revert to the earlier argument that the ACA continues to be the ecclesiastical authority over the parish, in spite of the fact that the appeals court had ordered that the retrial not consider this issue.
The actual story of Mrs Bush's relationship to the vestry came out in bits and pieces during testimony. After she was elected to the vestry in February 2012, she attended only two regular vestry meetings, the organizational meeting in February and the meeting in March. On April 9, 2012, during an attempted takeover of the parish by Anthony Morello, St Mary's dissidents, and members of the neighboring ACA parish All Saints Fountain Valley, Mrs Bush loudly announced in the parish courtyard her intention to dissociate herself from the elected vestry and cast her lot with the ACA.
Since she did not attend regular vestry meetings thereafter, although she knew the times and places, and since no members of the elected vestry tried to keep her away, it was assumed that she had voluntarily left her position on the vestry, and the vestry declared a vacancy in her position after the number of absences specified in the bylaws.
Mrs Bush, born in 1930, has aged visibly since 2012 and appears frail.
Much of the day's time was taken in cross-examination of the elected vestry's witnesses by Mr Lancaster. One puzzle for me was that, although Lancaster and Anastasia both sat at the counsel table, Lancaster did all the cross-examination, and as the day wore on, he clearly became tired and increasingly misspoke and repeated himself. He was bearing down on the tiniest clerical inadvertencies in things like vestry meeting minutes, but his own ability to keep these straight was challenged as he grew more tired.
In fact, his plodding, repetitious style wore down everyone in the courtroom. Several times, Judge Strobel rolled her eyes and looked at the clock. "Things don't happen like in the movies," a counsel told me in the elevator. "I do this every day."
We'll see how things develop.
