A typical Catholic or official Anglican diocese has resources---contingency funds, endowments, etc---to assist a parish in the short term if pastoral necessity dictates. If prudent analysis by the advisors you refer to dictates otherwise, the message goes out that the Big Plans must be nixed, because debt cannot be assumed without diocesan permission. A deficit budget is not an option. As you note, "continuing" parishes had complete latitude; I am familiar with a case in the ACCC where the parish paid the rector's wife rather than the rector so that he could continue to collect payments from the "Cost of Conscience" fund for unemployed former clergy who left the CofE over the ordination of women issue. Many former TAC clergy seem to remain in this world, but we cannot put SJE in this category as it was an ACC parish which seems to have parted company with the Anglican diocese on mutually respectful terms. But Houston seems to be more than usually hands off where Canada is concerned. No idea, really.The only conclusion I can come to from the string of reasoning I've been doing over the past week or so is that the SJE parish never really had the resources to purchase its building, and the 2014 warning from Fr Kenyon in yesterday's link goes some way to confirm this. Here's a question: why did the Anglican Diocese of Calgary not resist the parish's leaving? I've got to conclude, irrespective of any other reason, it was (a) because it was no great loss to the diocese, and (b) these doofuses were going to pay rent for the building and then buy it, which probably compensated for loss of diocesan tithe, which probably wasn't that great.
Hmm. The Episcopal diocese had no problem with St Luke's leaving to join the OCSP, either -- in fact, they let that parish go even before the OCSP was erected! Contrast this with the scorched-earth policy TEC has had over ACNA-wannabe parishes that attempt the same thing. Of those in the TEC Diocese of Los Angeles who tried this, all were clawed back, and three of the four have lost their buildings and pretty much folded. You can argue that the St Luke's case was a result of a sympathetic TEC bishop on the verge of retirement, but again, if this had been a more prosperous parish (it had apparently been neglecting its building, after all), things might not have been as easy.
Here's another question: what parish, leaving its denomination to try to join the OCSP, was in fact sued for doing this? Answer: St Mary of the Angels. As far as I can see, of the very small number of communities that actually tried to leave their former Anglican denomination as a full parish to enter the OCSP as the same legal entity, only St Mary of the Angels encountered this resistance. I think we can reasonably conclude that it was the only one whose value made it worth the lawsuit. Period. The only remotely comparable case is Our Lady of the Atonement, which was also valuable enough that the archdiocese resisted its transfer to the OCSP. Those have been the only two parishes worth fighting over. The others, with only a few exceptions, have no business even thinking about owning property.
The next question is why Houston has been allowing these small groups to think about this -- before he left St Luke's for San Antonio, Fr Lewis reported in the parish bulletin that Bp Lopes was encouraging that parish to buy property, even though it had already found maintaining a building unsatisfactory. My guess is that the parishes comparable to St Luke's or St John the Evangelist in size and income have no business at all trying to do such a thing. That the TEC and ACC dioceses would let them go to try this is indication enough.
And this goes to whether there are adults in charge in Houston. I began Bp Lopes's tenure as ordinary with the idea that Msgr Steenson was a bungler, and the record at St Mary of the Angels shows this -- there was no serious effort to move expeditiously to secure the multimillion-dollar property, with a five-figure cathedraticum, in the long months before the opportunists allied with the ACA saw their chance to seize the place. But as I look at how things seem to be playing out in Calgary, I'm not sure what, if anything, has changed.
If I were Abp Hepworth, Fr Kelley, and the parish vestry, I would be considering carefully and prayerfully what the best options are with this very valuable resource, as I'm less and less certain that Houston under Bp Lopes can handle it any better than it did under Msgr Steenson.
