African Methodist Episcopal v. Willard Lucien, Jr.

WIENER, Circuit Judge:

This appeal concerns a dispute over church property between a dissident local congregation (“Saint James”) and the national church (“AME”) with which it had been affiliated for many decades. Saint James filed an action in the City Court of Hammond, Louisiana, to evict several AME officeholders who had changed the church’s locks and taken over the premises. AME countered by filing its own action in federal district court several weeks later, seeking a declaration that in fact it was the members of the congregation’s dissident majority who, by severing ties with AME, had…