Bates called the presbytery’s interpretation of Wolf “nonsensical,” and said that the presbytery erected a “‘Stalingrad-type’ defense intended to financially force capitulation or to make victory by the small, 20-member Carrollton church as costly as possible.”

Sanctions have been imposed on a Presbyterian Church (USA) presbytery in the amount of $390,000 after the court “unavoidably” concluded that the presbytery had “in bad faith advanced frivolous arguments in support of a claimed right it knew had no legal or evidentiary support.”

In the matter of Carrollton Presbyterian Church v. Presbytery of South Louisiana (PSL), Judge Kay Bates of the 19th Judicial District Court, Parish of East Baton Rouge in Louisiana not only ordered the presbytery to pay the legal expenses accrued by the congregation in defending itself against the presbytery’s claims on its property, she also ordered the release of documents sealed during the trial – 441 emails between the presbytery, lawyers and Mark Tammen, who at the time was the director of Constitutional Services with the PCUSA Office of the General Assembly.

The case dates back to March 2008, when Carrollton Presbyterian Church, in Carrollton, La., filed a civil lawsuit against the presbytery seeking a declaratory judgment that it owned its property, free and clear of the presbytery.

The church had been in the process of selling its property to its contiguous neighbor, The Stuart Hall School for Boys, when the presbytery tried to block the sale by asserting that the denomination – not the church – owned the property. The court ruled in favor of the local church, as did the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal. Both the Louisiana Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case when the presbytery filed appeals.

Sanctions
In the court’s order, Tammen, who now serves as a presbytery executive in Long Island, N.Y., was described as the denomination’s “foremost in-house legal authority, … an attorney whose responsibilities include giving advisory opinions to PCUSA clergy and to legal counsel for synods and presbyteries concerning the meaning and application of the PCUSA constitution, the Book of Order.”

Tammen “bluntly informed” the presbytery that he saw “no way for the PSL to prevail,” read the court order, and it also stated that even the presbytery’s own corporate representatives, during depositions, acknowledged that “Carrollton continued to have the right to sell the property at issue without PSL permission.”

Despite Tammen’s words, the presbytery opposed the church, wrote Bates, and used as its central argument that the 1979 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Jones v. Wolf, “allows the PCUSA to impose a trust on local church property by amending the denominational constitution without the consent of the titleholder of record and without complying with either general principles of trust law or with the specifics of Louisiana trust law.”

However, she wrote, “Wolf unequivocally states that when applying neutral principles of law to resolve church property disputes, courts are to ascertain the mutual intentions of the parties and that the neutral principles of law method ‘relies exclusively on objective, well established concepts of trust and property law familiar to lawyers and judges’ … The PSL’s core argument is thus directly contradicted by the very case on which it has relied …”
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