Beyond Impaired Judgment

Over the past several months, I've been trying to work out, both for myself and for the record, a theory of what's going on here. A closer look at court documents, both recent and from earlier hearings, is giving me a better picture. A filing by Fr Kelley from October 18, 2013 in case BC485402 (which as far as I can determine is the case I've been referring to as the civil theft case) covers two major issues.

The first is the apparent effort by Lancaster & Anastasia to avoid making proper service of court papers to Fr Kelley. (They appear to have done this by sending them with metered postage, giving a postmark under their control, but delaying mailing until days later, or not mailing the material at all.)

The second issue is an enumeration of the worst acts by the parish dissidents following the ACA's attempt to seize the parish. I was generally aware of many of the ones enumerated, but not all of them, and the list altogether is something astonishing (scroll to Exhibit C-1 in the link):

• Placing a phone message impersonating an emergency room nurse at a local hospital, falsely informing a vestry member's elderly relative that the member had died in a car crash
• Verbal and telephone threats of arson and vehicle sabotage
• Physical assaults against two parishioners
• What appears to have been a vehicular assault on a member of the elected vestry
• Unsubstantiated complaints of child and elder abuse against elected vestry members, determined after investigation to have been unfounded.

The picture here is something beyond ordinary parish factionalism, which might normally involve verbal put-downs, whispering campaigns, snubbing, or even occasional angry outbursts -- but would not reach the level of assault, telephone harassment, telephone hacking, serious threats of property damage, and other potentially criminal conduct. The counsel for the dissidents, despite repeated requests, was unwilling or unable to exercise any restraint on their clients. Worse, it appears that ACA bishops have tacitly encouraged this behavior and never done anything to speak against it, moderate it, or disavow it.

I'm beginning to conclude from this sort of record that counsel's judgment is seriously impaired -- one explanation for using an office postage meter to mislead about a mailing date might be to disadvantage the defendant by denying timely service. Another might be a need to conceal that the paperwork had not in fact been prepared in a timely fashion. I'm inclined to think either explanation could be equally valid, and neither, if true, speaks well for counsel.

I'm beginning to wonder if the ACA bishops' judgment is seriously impaired as well. The ACA bishops, given the record of the past several years, have been behaving recklessly through remarkable detachment, endangering their reputations and effectively doubling down on the future of their denomination. This simply isn't pastoral conduct. Whether this can be explained by ordinary obstinacy and obtuseness, or whether some other condition facilitates it, is a matter for speculation.

My wife wondered the other day what motivated some of the parish dissidents in some of their own remarkably reckless conduct. "Maybe it's some sort of feeling that they're exalted or omnipotent," she said. I noted that there are certainly ways you can get to feel exalted and omnipotent, depending on what you ingest. I can only conclude that we're beyond explanations derived from ordinary inadvertency.