More Lawsuits May Emerge in S.C.

From The Living Church-

Parties to one of the longest-lasting legal disputes involving the Episcopal Church have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the matter on appeal.

The petition for a writ of certiorari asks the Supreme Court to rule in a legal battle involving All Saints, Waccamaw, S.C., which separated from the Diocese of South Carolina after its rector, Charles H. “Chuck” Murphy III, became a founding bishop of the Anglican Mission in the Americas.

The petition involves the consolidated cases of All Saints Parish, Waccamaw v. Protestant Episcopal Church and Green v. Campbell.

The Rt. Rev. Edward L. Salmon, Jr., Bishop of South Carolina from 1990 to 2007, was a party to All Saints v. Protestant Episcopal Church. The Rt. Rev. Mark Lawrence, who became Bishop of South Carolina in 2008, has never been a party to the dispute.

Meanwhile, the Diocese of South Carolina’s former chancellor, Thomas T. Tisdale, has sent a series of letters to its current chancellor, Wade H. Logan III, regarding four other parishes, some of which have distanced themselves from the Episcopal Church.

In the letters, which he began sending on Jan. 25, Tisdale identified himself as “South Carolina counsel for the Episcopal Church.” Bishop Lawrence challenged this description in an open letter to the diocese on Feb. 9 [PDF].

“He may be an attorney retained by the Chancellor for the Presiding Bishop, but it is hardly accurate in regards to the polity of this Church to claim to be an attorney of The Episcopal Church, as if the parishes, Standing Committee, and Bishop of South Carolina are somehow something other than The Episcopal Church,” the bishop wrote.

The rest is here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/2/18/more-lawsuits-may-emerge-in-sc