BishopAccountability.org
	Jury Finds Episcopal Bishop Did Not Commit Fraud in Defrocking of Priest By David O'Reilly Ledger-Enquirer October 25, 2008 http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/158/story/484839.html PHILADELPHIA - In a verdict based on a narrow legal question, a Montgomery County Court jury in Pennsylvania found Friday that Episcopal Bishop Charles E. Bennison Jr. did not commit fraud in the process that led to the defrocking of a priest in the Pennsylvania Diocese. In a potentially precedent-setting civil case, the Rev. David Moyer, rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, alleged that Bennison, head of the five-county diocese, fraudulently removed him from the priesthood in 2002. Moyer's lawsuit asked for unspecified damages for loss of employment and mental suffering. Moyer v. Bennison attracted international attention, especially in the theologically fractured Anglican Communion, to which the 2 million-member Episcopal Church USA belongs. If the jury had found for Moyer and if appeals courts sustained the verdict, the case would have opened a traditionally closed door in U.S. law by allowing clergy in religious institutions to sue their superiors over personnel matters. At the center of the case was Moyer's claim that Bennison threatened to defrock him if Moyer - a conservative openly critical of the bishop's liberal views - did not allow him to make pastoral visits to the Rosemont parish. Bennison, Moyer contended, had said his removal from the priesthood would take place with a church trial. When Moyer continued to bar Bennison, the bishop declared that Moyer had "abandoned communion" with the Episcopal Church by refusing to recognize Bennison's authority. He then defrocked Moyer with no church trial. During the four-day civil trial, Moyer's attorney, John Lewis, presented documents suggesting Bennison concealed from Moyer his plan to remove him without a church trial. However, the 12-member jury never got to deliberate whether that constituted fraud. Instead, Judge Joseph Smyth instructed jurors to first determine if the diocese engaged in fraud when it asserted that Moyer "abandoned the communion of the Episcopal Church" in 2002. That question was the "gateway" to all the other questions, Smyth told them, and trumped the question of whether Bennison deceived Moyer about a trial. If they decided fraud did not "pervade" the diocese's decision process regarding the abandonment of communion, Smyth said, the case was over. In less than three hours - including lunch - the jury announced that it had reached a verdict. When it returned, the forewoman told the judge that only two jurors had found fraud on the critical question. The verdict seemed to shock Moyer, who shook his head slightly and then gazed down at the table. The judge smiled broadly as the courtroom began to empty. On Wednesday, after Bennison's attorney, Mary Kohart, asked him to throw the case out on constitutional grounds, Smyth said from the bench that he was uncomfortable with civil courts' judging the internal workings of a church. The jurors had been in recess at the time of those remarks. Smyth said Wednesday he was allowing the case to continue largely in deference to his colleague, Common Pleas Court Judge Thomas Branca, who held four pretrial hearings on the issue of separation of church and state. The jurors declined as a group to speak to reporters as they left the courtroom. Lewis, a nationally known litigator who belongs to Moyer's parish, said he would "continue to fight the good fight," but did not say if that meant filing an appeal. Moyer, accompanied by his wife, Rita, declined to comment on the verdict. Bennison, who left by himself, said he was sad that his differences with Moyer had come to a trial, "since it further estranged the parish from the diocese." The Episcopal Church suspended Bennison, 64, as diocesan bishop a year ago after concluding he once concealed his brother's sexual abuse of a minor girl. In July, a special church court found him guilty of "conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy," and this month it sentenced him to be stripped of his status as priest and bishop. He is appealing that verdict and sentence in church court. Moyer has not been an Episcopal priest since Bennison defrocked him in 2002, but he has been licensed as a priest in several other provinces of the Anglican Communion and serves as a bishop in the conservative Traditional Anglican Communion. He has also remained rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd, which has pledged to fight any attempt by the Pennsylvania Diocese to claim its property and assets.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.