An additional thought on the Episcopal Church mess

One additional point about the TEC issue. One of the things that TEC is claiming in the Fort Worth and Quincy cases, as a byproduct of its claim that TEC has a hierarchical polity, is that the “church” essentially has a unitary structure, where parishes answer to their diocese, and dioceses answer to the Fuhrer national church. One problem with this is that TEC has always – ALWAYS – disclaimed that the church is hierarchical at the national level. I personally sat in a meeting with the Fuhrer’s Presiding Bishop’s predecessor, Frank Griswold, in which Bishop Griswold explicitly disclaimed that he had “metropolitical authority.” In other words, according to Bishop Griswold, he did not have the authority of an archbishop. So one wonders, then in the absence of appropriate revisions to the TEC canons, where theFuhrer claims this authority.