The Shepherds Who Feed Themselves

Across a dozen dioceses, The Episcopal Church has perfected the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused. A single watchdog is doing the work the shepherds will not

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I August 4, 2026

The Episcopal Church likes to present itself to the world as the safest room in American Christianity — inclusive, enlightened, trauma-informed, ahead of every curve. For a season the boast had substance. A generation ago, its sexual-misconduct policies were held up as a model other communions were told to imitate. But a church can live a long time on the memory of its own virtue, and this one has. While the Roman Catholic Church was hauled through the courts and the Southern Baptist Convention was forced into a public reckoning with its predators, the Episcopal Church — small, genteel, and largely beneath the notice of the secular press — has quietly perfected a different art: the art of protecting its bishops and abandoning the abused.

The pattern runs across a dozen dioceses, and it is always the same. The clergyman survives. The bishop who shielded him retires with his pension intact. And the person who was harmed is handed a “pastoral response,” shown the door, and told that the machinery of the church has, regrettably, done all it can.

A labyrinth by design

At the center of the failure sits Title IV, the denomination's clergy-disciplinary canon. On paper it is a solemn instrument of accountability. In practice it is a labyrinth — slow, opaque, and, when the accused wears a purple shirt, very nearly inescapable in the complainant's favor. The design flaw is structural and it is not subtle: bishops judge bishops. Complaints against them have historically passed through the Office of Pastoral Development, an arm of the Presiding Bishop's own establishment, before a Disciplinary Board for Bishops composed largely of their peers decides whether any of them will be inconvenienced. Ask a room full of shepherds to indict one of their own and you will get precisely the verdict the Episcopal Church keeps producing.

You need not take my word for it. In the autumn of 2023, fifty-five members of the House of Bishops signed a letter conceding what the laity had long suspected — that in case after high-profile case, bishops accused of misconduct had faced “few or no consequences.” It is a rare thing for an institution to confess its own corruption in writing. Rarer still for it to do anything about it.

If the second-highest officer cannot get justice

Consider the case of Julia Ayala Harris, President of the House of Deputies — the highest lay office in the church. She alleged that in July 2022, on the very day of her election at the 80th General Convention, a retired bishop “physically overpowered” her and made inappropriate remarks as she waited to be presented to the House of Bishops. Two other bishops witnessed enough to file reports; three eyewitnesses figured in the investigation. The accused was later identified as retired Oklahoma Bishop Ed Konieczny, who denied any wrongdoing.

And the outcome? As Episcopal News Service and The Living Church both reported, the church attorney referred the matter for a “pastoral response in lieu of disciplinary action” — which is ecclesiastical Latin for dismissal. No finding. No penalty. Ayala Harris called it an obvious abuse of discretion, and asked the question the whole church should have been asking: if the president of the House of Deputies can be treated this way at the very door of the House of Bishops, who in the church is safe? The bishops adopted a statement lamenting the “pain and grief.” Then they moved on.

 

The golden parachute

Then there is Prince Singh. In June 2023 his two adult sons and his former wife went public with allegations of years of physical, verbal, and psychological abuse. Singh — then bishop provisional of Eastern and Western Michigan, and before that Bishop of Rochester — was restricted from ministry that September and resigned the following day. He disputed the allegations throughout.

Note what followed, because it is the template. There was no trial in any meaningful sense. In December 2024 the new Presiding Bishop, Sean Rowe, announced an “accord” — a negotiated settlement — under which Singh was suspended, but pointedly not deposed. His family, who had begged the church for years to act, were left to plead publicly that Title IV “lends itself to retraumatizing survivors and to protecting offenders.” They are right. And Singh's predecessor in those same Michigan dioceses, Whayne Hougland, had himself been suspended in 2020 for an extramarital affair before being quietly restored. Two bishops, one set of dioceses, the same soft landing. The church calls it reconciliation. The rest of us recognize a golden parachute when we see one.

Grooming gets swept under the rug

Then we have the case of The Rev. Jonathan Adams, rector of Trinity Episcopal, in Upperville, Virginia, in the Diocese of Virginia the spiritual home of various billionaires, including the late Paul and Bunny Mellon, the church would seem to be a reliably safe place. Yet after a Fauquier County police report concluded that Adams had groomed a boy, and had informed the Diocese of its conclusions, Bishop E. Mark Stevenson did nothing more than issue a secret directive that basically told Adams to stop. Adams is on sabbatical, and has resigned as rector, effective in October. Meanwhile, he remains a priest in good standing and is still on the Trinity Church payroll — despite prior complaints to the Diocese alleging that Adams was bullying staff, including firing one person who questioned the credibility of Adams’ statements about his prior work experience.

The gravest case, and the coldest silence

But the case that should shame every bishop in the church is that of the Rev. Richard Losch. In 2023 a grand jury in Grafton County, New Hampshire indicted Losch, an Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Alabama, on a charge of aggravated felonious sexual assault of a boy under the age of thirteen — conduct alleged to date to the mid-1970s, when a boy from Marblehead, Massachusetts says Losch drove him across state lines to a Boy Scout camp and raped him. Losch denies the allegations. At trial in April 2025 the jury deadlocked, and he was not convicted. As a matter of law, he is innocent until a court says otherwise.

But the criminal law is not the church's excuse, and here the record is damning. According to Anglican Watch, whose reporting has been indispensable throughout, the victim pleaded for help from Episcopal officials more than a dozen times over several years — and was met, at every level, with indifference.

The intake officer did nothing. The Office of Pastoral Development, then under Bishop Todd Ousley — the man responsible for training bishops in their own disciplinary obligations — refused to get involved. Emails to the Presiding Bishop went unanswered. Anglican Watch has since charged that senior figures, including former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and Alabama Bishop Glenda Curry, failed in their duty, alleging that the church ignored mandatory reporting laws in multiple states and, in Glenda Curry's case, engaged in outright coverup. And through all of it — indictment, trial, hung jury — Richard Losch remained an Episcopal priest in good standing, well into his nineties.

A church that can suspend a bishop for an affair within months, but cannot bring itself to laicize an indicted alleged child rapist in years, has told you exactly what it values.

What the church will actually discipline

Which brings us to the bitterest irony of all. Comb the church's own transparency page for a bishop it has actually convicted and removed, and you arrive at William Love of Albany. His offense was not abuse, not assault, not the shielding of a predator. In 2020 a hearing panel found that Bishop Love had violated church law by forbidding his clergy to use the same-sex marriage rite. For declining, on grounds of conscience and Scripture, to bless what the church had newly decided to bless, he was disciplined and driven out.

Let that sit. The Episcopal Church's clearest, cleanest exercise of episcopal discipline in recent memory fell not on a man accused of harming the vulnerable, but on an orthodox bishop who would not perform a wedding. The institution defends what it truly worships, and its recent record reveals the object of its devotion. It is not the little ones for whom Christ reserved the millstone.

The lone watchdog

Almost none of this would be public without Anglican Watch and its editor, Eric Bonetti, a retired attorney who has turned an unofficial watchdog site into the one place the abused of this church can be heard. Its Episcopal Accountability Project invites victims to name their abusers and tell the truth in the open. It has been involved, directly or indirectly, in nearly every national-level bishop's case of the past several years. That the work of holding a wealthy denomination to its own canons should fall to a single dogged blogger is itself an indictment — of a General Convention that studies the problem, a House of Bishops that laments it, and a hierarchy that will do almost anything except surrender its own impunity.

Ezekiel knew these men. “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?” The Episcopal Church has bishops in abundance and shepherds almost nowhere. Until it is willing to depose one of its own for the sake of a child rather than a rubric, its policies are parchment and its apologies are noise. The abused are still waiting at the door. The bishops, as ever, have moved on.

David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and editor of VirtueOnline. Some 21,000 stories are archived at Virtueonline’s website: www.virtueonline.org His Substack on the Middle East can be found here: davidvirtue2.substack.com