The Diocese of Niagara’s addition to Canon 4.6

Canon 4.6 is full of turgid prose offering advice on things like where to stick your solar panels and what sort of permit is needed before erecting a tent within three metres of a building.

There is this interesting sentence, though, added in July 2013, displayed prominently in both the full document and much briefer summary:

All church buildings and land are either the property of the diocese or are held in trust on behalf of the diocese.

Parishioners basking in the blissful delusion that what they pay for they own, beware: you don’t, the diocese owns everything, even the tents.

10 thoughts on “The Diocese of Niagara’s addition to Canon 4.6

  1. Same is true in all Diocese as far as I know. And in RC Dioceses too. In Colorado in the 80s one parish left over ordination of women, and tried to keep their building. It went to the Colorado Supreme Court. The building belonged to the Diocese.

  2. No, don’t know better method. Just haven’t seen any until last week or so, so thought it might be a new problem.

  3. It might be a public spirited thing to ensure that this is mailed to all the remaining parishes, with a note to read the point from the pulpit. Just before the offering, to maintain the building.

    Considering the frequency with which clergy tend to say “this church is your church”, I always wondered whether some kind of lawsuit for obtaining money under false pretences might be possible.

  4. By the way, your website is incredibly slow much of the time these days. I can’t even tell if my comment above has been posted, after sitting here for two minutes watching it spin. Time to move host?

    • It runs fine on my ten year old computer. You probably already do this, but general advice is to run some good antivirus and, additionally, antispyware software. Norton is fine. Your provider may offer some program as part of its service. Alao, AVG is free, and even its modules you have to pay for are available free for a month on a trial basis. Also download and use Spybot S&D. Update all antivirus and antispyware programs frequently, certainly no less than once a week. Mine update and run automatically in the middle of the night.

      Estimates are that up to 985 percent of computers are infected with something. May be a lower number now, but it is still a major problem.

      Of course, it may also be your computer settings, set to scan everything it comes in contact with before fully downloading it. May be a combination of things, including infection.

      • However, it appears that this isn’t running on a home computer, but on a server somewhere running wordpress software. Perhaps on wordpress servers with the domain name pointing to it. I use wordpress for a couple of blogs, but it isn’t this slow. But I’d not blame any slowness on assorted garbage being on any of our personal computers.

  5. As the ACoC continues down its chosen path perhaps there is an anticipation that more Faithful will leave.

  6. This is rather off-topic, but for those interested in why the site is slow sometimes:

    It is hosted on a shared server with many other websites and, so, competes for cycles with them. When the server is overloaded, it throttles the cycles available to each site, slowing everything down. Here is a graph of recent throttling:

    Unfortunately, I am largely at the mercy of the hosting company. As someone above mentioned, I could switch companies but that is a time-consuming and painful exercise that I am not inclined to undertake at the moment.

    I may consider some other options if the slowdowns continue.

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