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Italians have taken notice of Gänswein, and nicknamed him "Bel Giorgio," which Americans might translate as: Gorgeous George. Paparazzi have snapped photos of him playing tennis in his tennis whites, while the Roman and Bavarian press eagerly report his bravura on the ski slopes and appearances at evening Church functions. Nevertheless, despite the glamour imposed on him by the celebrity press, the tall, athletic and dirty-blond Monsignor in his clerical black, concentrates on his pivotal but quiet job choreographing papal appearances. And that is how Americans will see him, in a supporting role buoyed by his scene-stealing...
...Virginia County Circuit Court Judge has ruled that at least according to a state statute, The Falls Church, where George Washington was once a vestryman - and which gave its name to the surrounding community - is covered under a state definition that would allow its conservative congregation to take the property into a non-Episcopal group supervised by the conservative Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria. The same goes for ten other churches in Virginia. Their monetary value has been estimated at over $20 million, but their symbolic value is considerably greater. The most immediate part of the ruling by Judge Randy Bellows...
...communion). The other, in Long Beach, Calif., was originally decided in favor of the seceding group but overturned on appeal, and is headed for the California State Supreme Court. As a sizable minority of conservative congregations leaves Episcopalianism, the struggle over who gets hundreds of millions of dollars of church property is becoming more and more intense. Passions range so high that the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the head of the national Episcopal body, in effect indicated during discovery in the Virginia case that she would rather see the churches sold and deconsecrated for secular purposes than passed...
...Judge Bellows' ruling has a second section that apparently requires more deliberation. Henry Burt, a spokesman for the Episcopal Church's Virginia Diocese, which had sued the 11 churches to maintain the property, admitted that "the finding in the case is initially favorable to the [seceding] congregations," but pointed out the judge has specified that the buildings could not change hands unless the second half of his trial determines that the Virginia law is actually constitutional. Hearings on that begin May 28. "And we are confident," says Burt, "that the Virginia law creates issues both with the First Amendment...
Indeed the constitutional issue is vital to the national battle. The Episcopal Church claims that the the agreements binding the rebels' property to it are not just contractual but theological. Therefore, Burt says, for any state government to contravene them "is not just messing with a corporate structure, but messing in a clear and fundamental theological belief." If Judge Bellows decides the Virginia law violates church-state separation it would create a precedent for decisions that would give tremendous authority to Episcopal claims. Should he decide the opposite, it would free seceding churches to appeal under various state laws that...