CGS Redux

Fr. Matt Kennedy has posted the latest decision in the litigation between his breakaway parish and the Diocese of Central New York. In it, Judge Ferrous D. Lebous rules on the Diocese's claim to certain assets ofthe parish, and the entitlement of Christ Church, the oldest Episcopal parish in Binghamton, to a trust vested in CGS and, should it cease to exist, to Christ Church. Judge Lebous held unequivocally that "the Church of the Good Shpeherd no longer exists as an Episcopal church, no longer exists in name, no longer exists within the meaning of the Branan Trust." (Opinion at 11). A logical corollary of its prior ruling? Perhaps; Fr. Kennedy states that "I did not know Mr. Branan but a number of our senior parishioners knew him very well and remember him to have been both very conservative and very loyal to Good Shepherd but not necessarily to the Episcopal Church." Judge Lebous, however, construed the trust documents, and found them to be sufficiently clear to allow him to reach a conclusion.

The sting of this ruling, however, is in its tail:
As indicated during oral argument, this court finds some of these allegations troubling. Good Shepherd's own counsel intima[ted] that parish members may have removed personal property to displeasure at this Court's former Decision & Order. Additionally, a there is an obvious lack of income flowing into Good Shepherd after April 2008. In other words, since April 2008, Good Shepherd was meeting but no pledge or plate revenue is identified during that time. Rather, the Diocese alleges that Good Shepherd was spending down an endowment fund to pay for daily operations, and diverting income elsewhere....On its face, it appears that the parish was doing everything it could to spend down the assets, divert new income, and perhaps actively interfere with the diocese's right of ownership
Id. at 13.

The Court ordered depositions of CGS's officials, beginning with Fr. Kennedy.

First Take on the Covenant Partnership

To their credit, the latest formation of a conservative episcopal faction in TEC seems to abhor schism as a means to maintaining a firm hold on the substance of the faith: thus their otherwise curious elevation of the Anglican Communion's sundry offices to ecclesial status. Only with such status would there be something these dioceses and their bishops could be part of which would make leaving TEC something other than an act of schism.

That may seem to imply they maintain a unity with the rest of TEC without the spirit of unity, or a unity merely pro forma. Maybe, but even such a thin unity would mean something, and even such a--to my mind--strained attempt to leave separation open while avoiding schism is a positive step.

Isn't there some way to build a more perfect, spiritual unity on that positive basis?

The Ends of Torture

Yeah, here's a shock:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

***

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

Is there anybody left who finds this surprising? As I pointed out as early as November 2005, the tactics used in our "enhanced interrogations" were drawn from a program designed to teach American service members to resist such techniques,which were designed to extract false confessions. And that's just what they were seeking to obtain--justification for the war they wanted, against the foe they wanted.

As Andrew Sullivan writes today:
The assertion of total power through unchecked violence - outside the Constitution, beyond the reach of the law (apart from legal memos from hired hacks instructed to retroactively redefine torture into 'legality') - will be seen in retrospect as the key defining theory of Bush conservatism. It ended, as all regimes bent on total power always end, with torture. Why? Because reality may differ from ideology; and when it does, it is vital to create reality to support ideology. And so torture creates reality by coercing "facts" from broken bodies and minds.

This is how torture is always a fantastic temptation for those in power: it provides a way for them to coerce reality into the shape they desire. This is also why it is so uniquely dangerous. Because it creates a closed circle of untruth, which is then used to justify more torture, which generates more "truth." This is the Imaginationland some of us have been so concerned about.

Or, as a senior adviser to Bush told Ron Suskind, people like him were "the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

We're an empire now.

Decline and Fall.

PSA on PSA

I have, as evidenced by Saturday's post, been working at coming to terms with the Atonement. It's a difficult doctrine to come to grips with, as we are, in our modern world, unclear what to make of God's sparing us, but at the terrible price of the Crucifixion. In that post, I described the help I'd found in the writings of Charles Gore with this issue.

Over at Stand Firm, Fr. Matthew Kennedy has posted a "Very Brief Thought on Penal Substitutionary Atonement in which he asks:
What do we call a judge who acquits a guilty person on the basis of a loving personal relationship?

Corrupt.

Justification is given to us through the vehicle of repentance and surrender to Christ's Person and full trust in his Work--or "faith" alone.

But justification is only possible through Christ alone--because Christ has borne hell in our place.

We are not acquitted on the basis of a personal relationship...God cannot simply "forgive" without compromising his character...an impossibility
Without meaning to be disagreeable, I think this is a singularly inapt analogy. Fr. Kennedy misses the reason that we would call such a judge as he hypothesizes a corrupt judge, i.e., that the judge would be sacrificing the rights of other parties for his own benefit. That simply isn't the case with sin; God is both the wronged party and the judge; the wrong is His to forgive. And God, in forgiving sin, is enacting in perfect form what we are bidden to do for each other--forgive wrongs not seven times, but seventy times seven.

The better analogy is what would we call a parent who, seeing his beloved child break a cherished family memento, forgives? Whatever the answer may be, it isn't corrupt.

Gore's notion may not be comprehensive, but I think it leads in a better direction.