Tag: civil authorities
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Orthodoxy and the First Shot of the American Civil War
This is about as unlikely a title for an article on American Orthodox history I ever expected to come up with! But a visit to a used bookstore in Canada a week ago has thrown up some whole new avenues for research. I found a slender volume entitled “Lincoln and the Russians.” (Woldman, Albert A.,…
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Hierarchical, Congregational, and the problems of the “parish”
In 1993, the Appeals Court of Massachusetts rendered its decision in (brace yourself) Primate and Bishops’ Synod of Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia v. Russian Orthodox Church of Holy Resurrection, Inc. We’ll just call it Primate from here on out. This case involved a Massachusetts ROCOR parish that left ROCOR and joined HOCNA in 1987.…
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The Dionisije Conundrum and why deference doesn’t work
I’m assuming, in this short article, that you’ve read about Serbian Diocese v. Milivojevich. But for those who haven’t: the Serbian Holy Assembly deposed Bishop Dionisije Milivojevich, and Illinois courts basically overruled the deposition on the grounds that the Holy Assembly hadn’t followed its own rules. The US Supreme Court reversed the judgment, holding that…
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Orthodoxy & the Courts: ecclesiastical questions are unavoidable
Until the early 1980s, some OCA parishes in the Diocese of Eastern Pennsylvania used the Old Calendar. In 1982, then-Bishop Herman Swaiko of Philadelphia ordered all of his parishes to switch to the New Calendar. Predictably, this wasn’t universally well-received. The majority of St. Basil Orthodox Church in Simpson, PA jumped to ROCOR, and this…
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Neutral Principles of Law in a Bulgarian parish dispute
Today I’ll be discussing Aglikin v. Kovacheff, a 1987 Illinois appellate court case involving a dispute over control of St. Sophia Bulgarian Orthodox Church in Chicago. The key question, in this case, concerns the extent of the diocesan bishop’s authority over the local parish. The bishop had dismissed certain members of the parish board of trustees — did he have…
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Hanna v. Malick: the Russy-Antacky schism in the Michigan Supreme Court
Prior to Bishop Raphael Hawaweeny’s death in 1915, pretty much all the Syrian (Antiochian) Orthodox in America recognized his authority. This included St. George Syrian Orthodox Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which was incorporated in 1910. The parish was under St. Raphael, and all seemed to be well. But in February 1915, St. Raphael died,…
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Ecumenical Patriarch denied appeal of Bishop Dionisije
Well, this is interesting. Lately, I’ve been looking at the Supreme Court case Serbian Diocese v. Milivojevich, which pitted the representatives of the Serbian Church against the incumbent American bishop, Dionisije, who had been defrocked by the Serbian Holy Assembly. The big question, which the Court answered in the negative, was whether civil courts in…
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Neutral Principles of Law and the Problems of Deference
So far, we’ve been discussing the role of civil courts in church property disputes in the context of the “deference” approach: that is, the courts will defer to the decisions of the highest church authorities. This was the position taken by the Supreme Court in both of its major Orthodox cases, Kedroff v. St. Nicholas Cathedral and Serbian Diocese v. Milivojevich. Not…
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Serbian Diocese v. Milivojevich, Part 2: Justice Rehnquist’s Dissenting Opinion
In my last article, I wrote about Justice Brennan’s majority opinion in Serbian Diocese v. Milivojevich, the 1976 Supreme Court case that deferred to the Holy Assembly of the Serbian Church in its defrocking of former US Bishop Dionisije and its reorganization of the American-Canadian Diocese. Click here for the opinions, and here for audio…
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Serbian Diocese v. Milivojevich, Part 1: Justice Brennan’s majority opinion
We’ve introduced the first major Supreme Court case dealing with Orthodoxy, Kedroff v. St. Nicholas Cathedral (1952). Today, we’ll begin an analysis of the other landmark case, Serbian Eastern Orthodox Diocese v. Milivojevich (1976). Justice Brennan’s majority opinion includes a lengthy historical background on the case, and I won’t go into all the details here;…