As it happens, over the past couple of months, I've slowly learned of an entire new round of litigation, which appears as Los Angeles Superior Court case 18STCV04171. Anyone interested in the details of this case can use the on line case summary page of the Los Angeles Superior Court and enter that case number in the field.
My current understanding of this case as a non-attorney is that in 2014, the ACA-appointed Bush vestry took out a loan for about $750,000 from a finance company that represented private investors, using the parish property and rental income stream as security. However, the date of this loan was two weeks after the California Court of Appeals overturned the original trial verdict that awarded the property to the ACA, in the course of which it affirmed that the ACA-Bush vestry was not the valid corporate board of directors.
The 2012 Kelley vestry did not learn of this loan, or the payments on it, until possession of the property was returned to it by the court in January 2016, when a review of incoming mail discovered that payments were being made. This opened a whole new bucket of snakes, with the outcome being that although the loan was unauthorized, it was secured by the parish property, and if the parish wanted to avoid seizure, it needed to continue making payments. This it did.
However, in early 2018, the ACA-Bush vestry successfully appealed the 2015 verdict awarding the property to the 2012 Kelley vestry, and the property was returned to the ACA-Bush faction that summer. (At this point, nearly everyone involved with the 2012 vestry and the parish that applied to join the North American ordinariate moved on, and nobody in that group is directly involved in the new case.) The best I can determine is that once the ACA Diocese of the West regained control of the property, it stopped making payments on the 2014 loan its vestry took out, even though the 2012 vestry had continued making those payments.
I'm told, by the way, that since regaining the property in 2018, Mrs Marilyn Bush, who is nearly 90 years old, is no longer involved in the litigation. The individual with the ACA Diocese of the West who is identified in the new case history is now Mr John Creel, who has long held various positions with that diocese and the All Saints Fountain Valley ACA parish.
According to the new case history, the private lenders who financed the 2014 loan to the Bush-ACA vestry, Richard and Terrie Sommers, began legal action in November 2018, presumably when payments from the Bush-ACA vestry, now in control of the property, became delinquent. The ACA vestry, now identified in the litigation as "The Rector, Warens [sic] and Vestrymen of St. Mary of the Angel's [sic] Parish in Hollywood Los Angeles California", countersued at the same time. The basis of the countersuit is not clear.
The misspelling and grammatical error in the name are intriguing. In the past, the Bush-ACA group used a similar strategy to open or continue ownership of accounts actually belonging to the 2012 vestry, which used the same title, just without the misspellings. They apparently were able to maintain a separate legal identity from the 2012 vestry while continuing to cash checks issued to the 2012 vestry, on the assumption that bank employees would overlook "typos". They appeared to have used the name "Angelican" as opposed to "Anglican" for a similar reason.
As best I can determine from the information that's been passed on to me, the legal position of the ACA and the current vestry is that since the 2012 vestry had continued payments on the 2014 loan, even though Mrs Bush signed the papers, it was the responsibility of the 2012 vestry to make those payments, not the vestry now in control of the parish, although that ACA vestry had in fact taken out the loan. At least six attorneys are listed in he current case history, although no doubt there will be additional law firm associates involved as well.
So as of 2017, we passed the 40-year mark on litigation that dates back to Fr Jack Barker's reckless decision to pull the St Mary of the Angels parish out of The Episcopal Church, but as of late 2018, a new round of litigation has begun, and we may reasonably assume it will take years to resolve.
The value of the property, located in a highly desirable upscale area, is certainly into eight figures, even leaving out the value of the Della Robbia altarpiece, itself probably worth in the mid eight figures. Thus multimillion-dollar litigation is justified, although it's hard to imagine any result at this point other than bankruptcy for the parish and sale of the property to pay creditors. But the facility is so small that it would probably not be worthwhile for the Catholic Church, either the archdiocese or the ordinariate, to consider picking it up on foreclosure, even assuming it could come up with the money.
"You will be able to tell them by their fruits. Can people pick grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles?" It's worth noting that the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society chose Fr Barker, the author of all these fruits, to keynote its conference this past November. Fr Barker withdrew at the last minute. I wouldn't want to be in his position if anyone asked him serious questions about what he had in mind back in 1976-77.
