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SOUTHERN VIRGINIA: Bishop Suffragan Joy Gallagher will quit
She orally accepts deal to leave No. 2 post at Southern Va. diocese
BY ALBERTA LINDSEY
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Mar 6, 2005
The bishop suffragan of the troubled Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia has agreed to accept a buyout offer and will step down.
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The Rt. Rev. Carol Joy Gallagher orally agreed Friday to vacate the post she has held for about three years, according to Sanders T. Schoolar III, a member of the panel that drew up the agreement.
The move comes after a recent attempt by the nearly 34,000-member diocese to oust its bishop, the Rt. Rev. David C. Bane Jr., whose leadership style has come under fire.
As bishop suffragan, Gallagher serves as an assistant to Bane. She cannot succeed him.
Schoolar said the buyout package was approved Friday by the diocesan executive board. The final agreement still has to be signed by Gallagher and the board. The terms of the buyout offer are confidential, said Schoolar, a former chairman of the diocesan executive board.
He added that Gallagher will seek other employment but plans to stay in Richmond until the end of the school year. She has a daughter who is a student at St. Catherine's School, an Episcopal girls school in Richmond.
Gallagher did not return phone calls yesterday. Her husband, Mark, said: "The process is moving along, but no final offer has been accepted."
Schoolar also said during a breakfast meeting yesterday that Gallagher is leaving. He gave an update at Manakin Episcopal Church in Midlothian on the state of the diocese.
Diocesan chancellor Charles Tucker of Norfolk declined to say whether Gallagher had been offered a buyout. "It's a personnel matter we are trying to deal with, and I can't comment on it. Hopefully, I can in a few days," he said.
Bane, bishop of the diocese since 1998, refused a buyout offer in January, saying he would not resign. He also was repeatedly asked to step down by delegates to the diocese's Annual Council meeting in February in Richmond. The council ended up adopting a resolution calling for Bane to ask the national church for help in pulling together the people of the diocese.
The diocese, with offices in Norfolk and Petersburg, has about 120 churches covering 25 counties and 16 cities from the Atlantic Ocean west to Appomattox and Danville. It includes the metropolitan area of Southeastern Virginia and the Richmond area south of the James River.
Last fall, an in-house committee report, which contained 66 recommendations, said the diocese was one of the most dysfunctional in the country. The report was highly critical of Bane's leadership style.
The report called the relationship between Bane and Gallagher disastrous. "The degree to which the parties disagree is legendary," it said. "Until very recently, communications between them were non-existent; the suffragan was limited in when and where she could speak and what she could speak about."
The report further stated that no specific duties were assigned to Gallagher and that she "has displayed an explosive temperament under a variety of circumstances."
Gallagher was elected bishop suffragan Oct. 13, 2001, and was consecrated April 6, 2002. A member of the Cherokee nation, she is the first American Indian female bishop in the Episcopal Church, the first indigenous female bishop in the worldwide Anglican Communion and the first female bishop in the three Episcopal dioceses in Virginia.
She served as an Episcopal priest for 11 years before being elected a bishop. She was the first female rector of St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Middletown, Del., which she served from 1996 until 2001.
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