Katharine Jefferts Schori, "Usurper"

The Anglican Curmudgeon always does a good job of exposing the truth.  He has shown how the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori has usurped authority.  Here's how:

• assert the right to inhibit other bishops without first obtaining the consents to inhibition which the Canon required;
• assert the right to introduce a resolution of deposition against a bishop whom she had not received permission to inhibit;
• usurp the parliamentary functions of the House of Bishops, and unilaterally read the language of the canons contrary to their historic interpretation and application;
• claim the authority to "derecognize" the duly elected members of diocesan Standing Committees, who, to the extent that there remained a viable diocese at the time, constituted its Ecclesiastical Authority;
• claim the authority to invoke special diocesan conventions, in violation of the provisions of the constitutions of those dioceses, and without bothering to give the required advance notice;
• declare that a quorum of clergy and laity each was "present" at the special conventions thus illegally called, even though the numbers fell far short of constitutional requirements for a quorum in each order;
• claim the authority to "recognize" the groups gathered at the unconstitutional conventions as full-fledged "dioceses" in their own right, and to dispense with their having to go through the steps to be approved as such by General Convention;
• claim the authority to designate, for the Archbishop of Canterbury's benefit, who was and was not entitled to be invited as a bishop to the 2008 Lambeth Conference;
• claim the authority to join with the illegally constituted "dioceses" and their illegally elected "provisional bishops" in lawsuits seeking to claim title to all the assets and property of the legitimate dioceses;
• claim the authority to hire her own Chancellor's law firm to prosecute dozens of lawsuits in the name of the whole Church, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars not provided in the Church's budget;
• claim the authority to "accept the 'voluntary' renunciation of holy orders" of bishops who have transferred to other provinces of the Anglican Communion, without their having had the least intention of doing so, and officially pronounce them "deprived of the right to exercise the gifts and spiritual authority as a minister of God's Word and Sacraments conferred in Ordinations"; and, last but not least, she has gone on to
• claim the authority to "undo", all on her own, a previous actual renunciation of orders by bishop upon leaving to join the Roman Catholic Church, and to reinstate the person as an Episcopal bishop without involving the House of Bishops.

Notice that each of these usurpations of authority has occurred in derogation of the authority of individual bishops, of self-governing dioceses, of the authority of the collective House of Bishops, or even of the authority of General Convention itself (as in her committing the Church to spend millions of dollars which it did not have budgeted). In short, without having ever been given the authority of a metropolitan, Bishop Jefferts Schori increasingly is acting like one.   Read more here.