Opinion ID: 3010098
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Federal Constitutional Law

Text: The Conference argues that the magistrate judge erred as a matter of law in applying neutral principles instead of the principle of deference. To understand this contention, we must travel through the Supreme Court's precedents involving intrachurch property disputes, in which it has attempted to draw a line between the constitutional interest in preserving the autonomy of religious organizations, on the one hand, and the civil interest in the definitive settlement of property disputes, on the other. We review each of the applicable Supreme Court decisions. As viewed seriatim, they provide historical perspective to the current status of the law. The first such case, Watson v. Jones, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 679 (1871), arose from a post-Civil War dispute between pro- and anti-slavery factions of a Kentucky church that was a member of the Presbyterian Church of the United States. The proslavery group, which was the minority faction, claimed title to the church property based on the fact that its views were more consistent with the teachings of the Presbyterian Church at the time of the Kentucky church's founding. The Presbytery of Louisville, the next highest governing church body after the church itself, declared the pro-slavery minority the true church body and, therefore, rightful titleholder. The General Assembly, however, the highest governing body in the Presbyterian Church, decided in favor of the majority abolitionist faction instead. The Watson Court, following the General Assembly's result, ruled in the abolitionist group's favor, and in the process established the following principles: federal courts are competent to enforce express terms contained in trust instruments governing the use or ownership of property. 80 U.S. at 723-24. However, courts may not resolve nor inquire into matters of religious doctrine in order to determine entitlements to property. Id. at 725, 727-29. Where a dispute arises between factions of an independent congregation, the rights of such bodies to the use of the property must be determined by the ordinary principles which govern voluntary associations; if the church had always governed itself by majority rule, for example, the majority faction would prevail. Id. at 725. Finally, where the dispute is between subordinate and superior bodies of a single hierarchical church organization, and whenever the questions of discipline or of faith, or ecclesiastical rule, custom or law have been decided by the highest of these church judicatories to which the matter has been carried, the legal tribunals must accept such decisions as final, and as binding on them, in their application to the case before them. Id. at 727. The Watson approach is popularly termed the deference approach, and requires judicial recognition of the decisions of a hierarchical church's highest body on matters of discipline, faith or ecclesiastical rule, custom or law. Although Watson was decided before the Fourteenth Amendment was interpreted to render the First Amendment applicable to the states, and therefore cannot strictly be termed a constitutional interpretation, later Supreme Court opinions have recognized its holding as grounded in concerns of constitutional dimension. See, e.g., Kedroff v. St. Nicholas Cathedral, 344 U.S. 94, 116 (1952). The Watson rule of deference was further defined in Gonzalez v. Roman Catholic Archbishop, 280 U.S. 1 (1929), a case in which a layman sued the Archbishop, claiming a right to be appointed to a chaplaincy and to receive a concomitant income according to the terms of a trust created 100 years earlier by an ancestor. The Archbishop had refused to appoint the plaintiff on the ground that he did not meet the qualifications for a chaplain specified by the 1918 Code of Canon Law. The Supreme Court rejected the Archbishop's contention that secular courts lacked any jurisdiction over the case because of the ecclesiastical nature of the dispute, holding instead that there was subject matter jurisdiction because the suit involved an attempt to enforce the terms of a trust. Id. at 16. Nonetheless, the Court deferred to the Archbishop's decision to deny the petitioner the chaplaincy, holding: Because the appointment is a canonical act, it is the function of the church authorities to determine what the essential qualifications of a chaplain are and whether the candidate possesses them. In the absence of fraud, collusion, or arbitrariness, the decisions of the proper church tribunals on matters purely ecclesiastical, although affecting civil rights, are accepted in litigation before the secular courts as conclusive, because the parties in interest made them so by contract or otherwise. Id. at 16 (emphasis added) (footnote omitted). Thus, while Watson directed blanket judicial deference to determinations of a church's highest body in ecclesiastical matters, dictum in Gonzalez suggested there could be some judicial review of church decisions in those exceptional cases in which fraud, collusion, or arbitrariness was alleged. The next case, Kedroff v. Saint Nicholas Cathedral, 344 U.S. 94 (1952), involved a dispute over use and occupancy of the Russian Orthodox cathedral in New York between Archbishop Leonty, elected to preside over all Russian Orthodox churches in America by the local churches themselves, and Archbishop Fedchenkoff, appointed to preside over the same churches by the Supreme Church Authority in Moscow. The decision as to the rightful occupant turned on which of the two had been validly selected as ruling hierarch for the American churches. The Supreme Court ruled in Fedchenkoff's favor, stating that matters of ecclesiastical government were among those questions marked by Watson as outof-bounds for civil adjudication, id. at 115, and noting that [e]ven in those cases when the property right follows as an incident from decisions of the church custom or law on ecclesiastical issues, the church rule controls, id. at 120-21 (footnote omitted). The Court's subsequent opinion in Presbyterian Church in the United States v. Mary Elizabeth Blue Hull Memorial Presbyterian Church, 393 U.S. 440 (1969), is of particular significance to the issue before us. That case involved the decision of two Presbyterian churches in Georgia to withdraw from the national Presbyterian Church in the United States because of the latter's progressive tendencies (ordination of women, church pronouncements on political issues, etc.). The general church acknowledged their withdrawal and attempted to reabsorb the local church properties. The local churches responded with lawsuits in state court. Holding that Georgia law implied a trust of local church property for the benefit of the general church so long as the general church adhered to the same tenets of faith and practice existing at the time of affiliation by the local churches, the state trial court presented the case to a jury, which was instructed to determine whether the general church's actions constituted a substantial abandonment of its original tenets and doctrines. Id. at 443. The jury found in favor of the local churches, and the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed. The Supreme Court of the United States overturned the decision, explaining that [i]t is obvious . . . that not every civil court decision as to property claimed by a religious organization jeopardizes values protected by the First Amendment. Civil courts do not inhibit free exercise of religion merely by opening their doors to disputes involving church property. And there are neutral principles of law, developed for use in all property disputes, which can be applied without establishing churches to which property is awarded. But First Amendment values are plainly jeopardized when church property litigation is made to turn on the resolution by civil courts of controversies over religious doctrine and practice. 393 U.S. at 449 (emphasis added). Thus, as an alternative to the Watson/Gonzalezdeference approach where the courts would be engaging in the narrowest kind of review of a specific church decision [to determine] whether [the decision] resulted from fraud, collusion, or arbitrariness, id. at 451, the Presbyterian Church Court suggested that the Georgia courts could apply neutral principles of secular property law to resolve intrachurch disputes. One year later, in Maryland and Virginia Eldership of the Churches of God v. Church of God at Sharpsburg, Inc., 396 U.S. 367 (1970), the Supreme Court upheld a state court's application of this neutral-principles approach in a threesentence per curiam opinion. The case involved an intrachurch property dispute between the General Eldership of the church and two secessionist congregations. Citing the Maryland appeals court's reliance upon provisions of state statutory law governing the holding of property by religious corporations, upon language in the deeds conveying the properties in question to the local church corporations, upon the terms of the charters of the corporations, and upon provisions in the constitution of the General Eldership pertinent to the ownership and control of church property, the Court concluded that resolution of the dispute involved no inquiry into religious doctrine and therefore did not violate the First Amendment. Id. at 367-68. Justice Brennan, apparently intent on providing state courts with some explanatory guidance, filed a concurring opinion, outlining the acceptable approaches to intrachurch disputes: [A] State may adopt any one of various approaches for settling church property disputes so long as it involves no consideration of doctrinal matters, whether the ritual and liturgy of worship or the tenets of faith. Id. at 368 (Brennan, J., concurring) (emphasis in original). Justice Brennan identified and contrasted the deference approach and the neutral-principles approach. A state may adopt the deference approach taken in Watson and enforce the property decisions made within a church of congregational or hierarchical polity unless 'express' terms in the 'instrument by which the property is held' condition the property's use or control in a specified manner. Id. at 368-69 (quoting Watson, 80 U.S. at 722). The latter instance would be appropriate for application of the neutral-principles approach in intrachurch disputes. Citing Presbyterian Church, Justice Brennan stated: '[N]eutral principles of law, developed for use in all property disputes,' provide another means for resolving litigation over religious property. Under the 'formal title' doctrine, civil courts can determine ownership by studying deeds, reverter clauses, and general state corporation laws. Id. at 370. He cautioned, however, that general principles of property law may not be relied upon if their application requires civil courts to resolve doctrinal issues. For example, provisions in deeds or in a denomination's constitution for the reversion of local church property to the general church, if conditioned upon a finding of departure from doctrine, could not be civilly enforced. Id.(emphasis added) (footnote omitted). The dispute in Serbian Eastern Orthodox Diocese for the United States and Canada v. Milivojevich, 426 U.S. 696 (1976), the next case in the series, was over control of the Serbian Eastern Orthodox American-Canadian Diocese, its property and its assets. In response to complaints about the Diocese's Bishop, Bishop Dionisije, the central church removed him as Bishop and reorganized the American-Canadian Diocese into three new dioceses. The Diocesan National Assembly subsequently repudiated the central church's actions and declared the Diocese completely autonomous. Bishop Dionisije filed suit in state court seeking injunctive and declaratory relief. The Illinois Supreme Court entered judgment that invalidated Bishop Dionisije's removal as arbitrary because the removal proceedings were not conducted according to the court's interpretation of the Church's constitution and penal code and voided the Diocesan reorganization as beyond the scope of the central church's authority. Id. at 708. The United States Supreme Court overturned both parts of the judgment, and explained: The fallacy fatal to the judgment . . . is that it rests upon an impermissible rejection of the decisions of the highest ecclesiastical tribunals of this hierarchical church upon the issues in dispute, and impermissibly substitutes its own inquiry into church polity and resolutions based thereon of those disputes. Id. The Court declared that where resolution of the disputes cannot be made without extensive inquiry . . . into religious law and polity, courts must accept the applicable decision of the highest church body in a hierarchical church as binding. Id. at 709. The Court noted (1) that the First Amendment's command that civil courts refrain from resolving controversies over religious doctrine applie[d] with equal force to church disputes over church polity and church administration, id. at 710, (2) that, Gonzalez notwithstanding, no arbitrariness exception existed in the sense of an inquiry whether the decision of the highest ecclesiastical tribunal of a hierarchical church complied with church laws and regulations, id. at 713, (3) that the court's evaluation of conflicting testimony concerning internal church procedures and rejection of the highest church body's interpretations were particularly inappropriate, id. at 718-19, (4) that reliance on neutral principles could not justify a court's substitution of its own interpretation of church rules for that of the church's highest body, id. at 721, and (5) that the church constitutional provisions at issue were not so express that the civil courts could enforce them without engaging in a searching and therefore impermissible inquiry into church polity, id. at 723. The final case in the series, Jones v. Wolf, 443 U.S. 595 (1979), gives shape to the proper modern judicial approach to intrachurch disputes. Jones arose from a dispute between two factions of a Presbyterian church congregation in Macon, Georgia over possession and use of the church property. The church had always been a member of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), but a majority of the congregation voted to disassociate the church from the PCUS and join the Presbyterian Church in America. The Augusta-Macon Presbytery, the next highest body in the PCUS hierarchy after the congregation itself, appointed a commission to investigate and it ruled the minority faction constituted the true congregation. So armed, the minority faction sued in state court for exclusive possession and use of the church property. Georgia's courts had adopted the neutral-principles approach to resolve intrachurch property disputes and, purporting to apply them, the trial court reasoned that because the deed conveyed the property to the local church, and neither state law, the corporate charter of the local church, nor the constitution of the general church created any trust in favor of the general church, legal title to the property was vested in the local congregation. Then, without further elaboration, the trial court declared the majority faction to be the true congregation entitled to possession. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed. The United States Supreme Court upheld the Georgia Supreme Court's reliance on the neutral-principles approach and reaffirmed the viability of that approach under the Constitution. The Court stated that [t]he primary advantages of the neutralprinciples approach are that it is completely secular in operation, and yet flexible enough to accommodate all forms of religious organization and polity. Id. at 603. It continued, [t]he method relies exclusively on objective, well-established concepts of trust and property law familiar to lawyers and judges. It thereby promises to free civil courts completely from entanglement in questions of religious doctrine, polity, and practice. Id. The Court noted that although the Augusta-Macon Presbytery, the highest church body to decide the question, had declared the minority faction to be the congregation, the Georgia Supreme Court had determined just the opposite. Significantly, notwithstanding Watson's deference approach and the decision in Milivojevich, the Supreme Court did not hold that the result by the Georgia courts could not be sustained. Instead, the Court held that there was no requirement that the Georgia Supreme Court adopt a rule of compulsory deference. Nonetheless, because the basis for the Georgia courts' decision that the majority faction represented the true congregation of the local church was unclear and was made without adequate analysis, the Supreme Court remanded for determination by the Georgia courts whether that state had adopted a presumptive rule that a voluntary religious organization is represented by a majority of its members. If so, then the Georgia courts' judgment awarding the property to the majority faction would stand under the neutral-principles approach. However, the Court cautioned that if Georgia law provided instead that a congregation's identity should be determined according to the rules of the hierarchical parent church, the Georgia courts would owe deference to the Presbytery's determination in favor of the minority faction. Seeid. at 609. It is evident from the above that before we can apply the instructions learned from the Supreme Court's cases to the issue at hand, we must determine whether the district court correctly ruled that New Jersey has adopted the neutralprinciples approach. To do so, we examine the leading cases in that state.