Chancellors Duncan Bayne of Olympia, Joe Delafield of Maine, and Stephen Hutchinson of Utah have issued a statement on the Disciplinary canons revised in 2009 and that go into effect July 2011. According to Episcopal News Service:
… [the chancellors] have issued a paper which they assert “conclusively establishes the constitutionality of the amendments.”
The statement, posted here, was written by Duncan Bayne, Diocese of Olympia vice chancellor; Stephen Hutchinson, Diocese of Utah chancellor and Joseph Delafield, Diocese of Maine chancellor. Delafield, the spokesperson, said that all three were “active participants in the nine-year process of development and adoption of the amendments.”
The three have also posted at the same site a series of flow charts and notes detailing the new clergy disciplinary process.
The current Title IV canons are here and the revised version is here.
Delafield said in his short statement that the three wrote the paper in response to questions that have been raised by the leadership of the Diocese of South Carolina and others as to whether the revision conforms to the church’s constitution.
The nine-page paper also says that it comes in response to a paper entitled “Title IV Revisions Unmasked,” written for the Anglican Communion Institute by C. Alan Runyan, a South Carolina lawyer, and Mark McCall, a member of the New York bar. The ACI has no official tie with the Anglican Communion Office.
The writers defending the Title IV revisions say that the church’s constitution authorizes the canons to spell out the presiding bishop’s duties while the opponents say that the presiding bishop’s duties and authority are limited by the constitution.
Tobias Haller blogging at In a Godward Direction comments:
I am happy to see that a group of diocesan chancellors has issued a response to the claims of the ACI and South Carolina that Title IV grants unconstitutional powers to the Presiding Bishop. I am also pleased to see that even as a legal amateur I anticipated a number of the arguments in defense of the authority of the PB that appear in this paper. The strangest of these claims by the ACI and SC is that the Presiding Bishop requires permission to exercise tasks assigned to her in the Constitution and Canons, based on the restriction of bishops’ exercise or their office to the diocese for which they are consecrated. The present paper defends the PB’s right, and indeed duty, to carry out these responsibilities, and there is no indication that permission is needed to do something mandated by law.
Read the response here.