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BISHOP OF PENNSYLVANIA COULD FACE ECCLESIASTICAL COURT TRIAL
By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
3/28/2007
The Bishop of Pennsylvania, Charles E. Bennison could face an ecclesiastical court trial.
A complaint alleging that he has mismanaged the finances of the diocese by the Diocesan Standing Committee, which includes ten lay and clerical members of the Diocese of Pennsylvania, was forwarded on March 14 to the Title IV Review Committee pursuant to Canon IV.3(26).
The charges were approved by Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori and a letter was sent under the signature of David Booth Beers, Schori's attorney and sent to the Rt. Rev. Dorsey F. Henderson, Jr. Diocese of Upper South Carolina who heads the committee.
On Friday, March 2, 2007, the members of the Standing Committee and those who had filed the complaint against Bishop Bennison had a meeting with David Beers, Chancellor to the Presiding Bishop, and his assistant, Mary E. Kostel, and Michael F. Rehill, Special Counsel to the Standing Committee, and his assistant Pamela L. Lutz.
"It was a full and frank discussion of the complaint against Bishop Bennison and the canonical process and procedures," said a member of the Standing Committee of the Diocese.
Most of the diocese including his liberal backers would now like to see the bishop gone. He has lost the trust of the diocese and calls for his resignation reached crescendo proportions at the last diocesan convention, when it was learned that Bennison had covered up his brother (also an Episcopal priests') sexual exploitation of a young girl.
Bennison also faces two civil court suits filed by Fr. David L. Moyer, the Anglo-Catholic priest at Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont, PA for "bad faith and fraud".
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