Occupiers trash, urinate on Cross, and steal from NYC church.

How d’ya like those Occupiers?  Huh? Huh?

I read a story the other day that the rat population is exploding in the Occupiers zone in Washington DC.

Now I read in the New York Post that they trashed churches where the pastor was giving them some help.

‘God’-awful OWS mob steals sacred item from church
Churches desecrated
By CANDICE M. GIOVE

There’s no longer room at the inn at a Manhattan church that’s sheltering Occupy Wall Streeters after a holy vessel disappeared from the altar last week.

When the Rev. Bob Brashear prepared for Sunday services at West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street, he noticed parts of the bronze baptismal font were gone.

In a fire-and-brimstone message to occupiers later that day, he thundered, “It was like pissing on the 99 percent.

In Brooklyn, at another church housing OWS protesters, an occupier urinated on a cross, according to Rabbi Chaim Gruber, who has angrily abandoned the OWS movement.

In a letter last week to OWS obtained by The Post, the rabbi fumed, “The Park Slope church housing occupiers was desecrated when an occupier peed inside the building and the pee came into contact with a cross.”

The pastor of the church did not return calls.

At West Park, Rev. Brashear walked into the church for a morning service to find the 18-inch-diameter bronze basin and lid missing from the baptismal font’s 800-pound base. Holy water — straight from the River Jordan — had been poured from the missing basin insert into the base’s bowl.

About 60 occupiers had rolled out their sleeping bags between the pews the night before as part of their evening ritual, Rev. Brashear recalled. When they returned to the church later, following the pastor’s discovery, he issued a stern warning: “You have 24 hours to find it and to come up with an amends and to come up with a plan.
‘I’m sorry and it won’t happen again’ won’t work,” he scolded.

The artifact vanished just three weeks after a $2,400 Apple MacBook vanished from Brashear’s office
. He told the occupiers that even when the 100-year-old Upper West Side church extended help to addicts during the 1980s drug scourge, no visitors touched its $12,500 sacramental instrument.

Not even crackheads messed with that,” he said.

The pastor and a worshipper finally found the missing basin tossed into a small room connected to the church. The lid is still missing. The pastor has given protesters two weeks to vacate the church.

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30 Comments

  1. Ellen says:

    Two weeks? I say toss them out right now.

  2. Supertradmum says:

    Many years ago, in doing research for a book I wrote, I read the letters of the Visitators who went into the abbeys of England, stealing and destroying the sacred objects and sacred places. In one letter to Thomas Cromwell, painting here http://www.tudorplace.com.ar/images/Cromwell,Thomas(1EEssex)01.jpg
    three of the Visitators described riding their horses into the sanctuaries of the altars at Fountains Abbey, ripping open the tabernacles and throwing the Consecrated Hosts on the ground. The men then wrote how they made their horse step on their Creator and God.

    This scene repeated itself all over Great Britain. Such things as described above were done-brass stolen, crosse and statues defiled, items desecrated with pee and worse. We are in the same climate of hatred for Christianity. Can people not see the connections between these incidences, the ones in Italy last Autumn, and our own legislation against religious freedom? If we are naive, it is our own fault.

  3. cgvnau says:

    I agree with Ellen. What is he waiting for? Is he holding out for two weeks to see if the lid turns up?

  4. KAS says:

    Two WEEKS? AH, no that pastor should have given them a few hours at most and called the police to come ask questions in the meantime. I’m sure somebody or everybody knew who did the theft. My guess is the bowl was tossed into a room because it had not yet been carried off and sold. In my area, metal thieves have been tearing up air conditioning systems of churches to sell the metals.

  5. robtbrown says:

    The OWS movement reminds me of the protests against the Viet Nam war. What begins as a legitimate demonstration provides the opportunity for the professional lefties to move in. The students go back to school, and the party goers leave hungover. What is left behind is an ambition free crowd looking for a handout, whose morning orange juice is a joint.

  6. trad catholic mom says:

    Yes, I wouldn’t have given them 2 weeks. More like 5 minutes.

  7. NoTambourines says:

    99%, 1%… I want to be in whatever percentage group that can keep their bodily fluids to themselves. In any argument, I think I’m going to favor the side that’s potty trained.

  8. acardnal says:

    Maybe stealing is their modus operandi for becoming one of the one percent!

  9. Fr Deacon Daniel says:

    Breibart’s site has been chronicling the rap sheet on the “Occupy Whatever” Socialist Movement. I guess this latest makes 418?

    http://biggovernment.com/jjmnolte/2011/10/28/occupywallstreet-the-rap-sheet-so-far/

    Reading about the anti-social nature and behaviors of many involved in this movement, I am reminded of the late, great Thomist philosopher, Joseph Pieper, and his very fine work “On Hope,” especially the section on the effects of sloth/acedia on the human person and its stages of descent. O.W.S. is a rapid, visible social movement of descent into the hopeless torments of the damned in part because we have raised several generations on a Marxist-materialist eschatology in which the Christian notion of the supernatural grace and virtue of hope has no place.

    If you have not read Pieper’s work, this lowly Byzantine deacon would highly recommend it for Lent. Hope should be the occupation of us all, especially given the rampant despair that fills the current social climate.

  10. Andy Milam says:

    My sentiments lie with Ellen.

    TWO WEEKS!!!!!! I say give them 2 minutes! Compassion be damned.

    The old addage, “Fool me once, shame on you….fool me twice, shame on me” certainly applies in this case. As soon as the computer came up missing, I would have said enough!

    The bigger question is why wasn’t OWS at a COGIC temple? That would make more sense….

    just sayin’…

  11. departing contestant says:

    at the risk of being repetitious….2 weeks….really

  12. irishgirl says:

    I’m with Ellen on this one.
    I wouldn’t give these guys two weeks….I’d give them TWO SECONDS to ‘fess up and say what happened to the font, and then throw ’em out on their ears!
    And I also echo Andy Milam’s ‘Compassion be damned’!
    This whole ‘OWS’ thing has gone ‘way, way out of control. It should have been nipped severely in the bud from the very start last fall!
    ‘High pressure water cannons’, anyone?

  13. benedetta says:

    It’s pretty much the way the Stalinists desecrated churches…

  14. jeffreyquick says:

    Just so I don’t have to say, “Two weeks?!”, how come it’s been ONE WEEK since your RSS feed worked? The comments feed works, but not the actual blog post feed…and as a Bloglines user, I miss it.

  15. Why did the pastor let them crash there in the first place?

    I have no idea how Presbyterians operate. Maybe this was voted on by the community somehow, but apart from this, if I were a donating member of that congregation, this is the question I’d be asking the Rev. Brashear.

  16. ScholaLady says:

    Hmmm…taking whatever they want and trampling on the rights of others. I thought that was the kind of thing they were protesting.

  17. xzsdfweiuy says:

    Father, let me paraphrase the reasoning that a protestant church in my city published
    for opening up their church to let the homeless sleep at night (not occupiers specifically,
    but this was done in the context of the occupy movement): “Our congregation is dwindling,
    and we won’t be around forever, but we have this real estate, and this is something we can
    do to help the poor”. Speaking in comboxes is a habitual sin for me, so I won’t go on to wrap
    this with an opinion, but I imagine that this strikes many Catholics in the same way it does me.

  18. It seems to me that the “homeless” and the OWS crowd are two distinct groups.

  19. jilly4ski says:

    @NoTambourines
    I don’t know, my 2 year old, who isn’t quite potty trained seems to have more respect for other peoples property than the OWS protesters. He makes sure to put the Mass cards and hymnals back in their spot after Mass, and cleans up all of Grandma’s toys before we leave. As the OWS protester’s ‘philosophy’ seems to necessitate theft of the property of the 1%, it doesn’t surprise me that they are stealing from anybody who has something they want. They have already proven incapable of distinguishing the 1% from people just trying to make a living, like the small businesses around their protest sites, and the truck drivers and port workers, when they were trying to disrupt the big businesses and the economy (?). Personally, it seems like they had no interest in raising the fortunes of anybody and only want to bring the 1% down to their level.

  20. APX says:

    @ jilly4ski
    my 2 year old, who isn’t quite potty trained seems to have more respect for other peoples property than the OWS protesters.

    My dog, who is old and sometimes has accidents when no one is home, has more respect for other’s property than these people do. She’ll at least avoid the carpet and the hardwood flooring and use the ceramic tile. When you get home, she’ll come get you and take you to the spot (before you have a chance to walk in it >:-( ).

    Two weeks to vacate?? Obviously this priest has more patience than I do. I would have chased them out with my pitchfork.

  21. justinmartyr says:

    @xzsdfweiuy:
    The mindset at West Park Presbyterian is very similar. Manhattan’s Upper West Side is a neighborhood of mostly prosperous and well-educated folk, bounded by Lincoln Center to the south and Columbia University to the north. Most Protestant churches there have been dying slowly and pathetically for decades, and the ones that remain have generally managed to survive only by becoming bastions of progressive politics in this very liberal neighborhood. Riverside Church and St. John the Divine are the best-known examples, but West Park is very much in the same tradition. I wish none of them ill, the clergy and congregants at these places are generally quite nice and well-intentioned — but I have to say that the Reverend Mr. Brashear has no one to blame but himself.

  22. Tantum Ergo says:

    “The pastor has given protesters two weeks to vacate the church.”

    Such misguided kindness… I wonder if a skunk found in the church would get two weeks also.
    The extent of kindness I’d give them is a sincere wish that the door not hit them on their keesters on the way out.

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  24. Brad says:

    My Polish pastor was a priest sent to USSR as it was collapsing. The pre-Lenin churches were filled to the rafters with fecal fertilizer and tractors.

    Per the article, a generic crack head in the 80s is just as soul lost in his own personal spiral of addiction and appetite. Pales in comparison to the rank old ideologies present in the Occupiers. Old as in “non serviam”, which was first uttered about a zillion years before Lenin. Unfortunately for us, the very being who uttered those worlds is immortal and is locationaly present in the mobs today. He’s not just a bad memory like a human tyrant, long in the ground.

  25. PostCatholic says:

    “La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.” -Anatole France

    We’ve been told over and over by the mainstream media and by the Occupy dilettantes themselves that the 99% includes the homeless, the very mentally ill, and professional criminals. I don’t think that vandalism is behavior to be tolerated. But I wouldn’t tar every protester with the same brush as the vandals, unless they also think destructive behavior is acceptable.

    I suspect most don’t, and that these problems are the result of having cast too wide a net over their constituency. Perhaps they should be about the 98%, excluding both the top and bottom extremes? Politicians seem to like to appeal to the “middle class” without ever defining the boundaries.

  26. PostCatholic says:

    That seems not to be provocative enough. Trying again with a more direct analogy.

    A fact : There are some priests who like to rape children. They are a fractional minority within a larger set. Should all priests be accountable for this crime? When they place themselves beneath leadership that either condones such behavior, or fails to raise a proportionate response to such an outrage, then yes. Overwhelming, Catholic leadership has been proportionate and intolerable of priest-rapists, as have the led, and yet much of the world fails to see this nuance. Perhaps that is because observers see a systemic fault in the power structure.

    Do you think there is a systemic fault in the power structure of the Occupy movement?

  27. Ed the Roman says:

    Post (may I call you Post?) the offense rate of OWS dwarfs that of priests by several orders of magnitude.

  28. PostCatholic says:

    I’m not sure of that, Ed the Roman. It’s hard to tell with so much dishonesty among the hierarchs. And in any event, vandalism to property is a far lesser crime than violent vandalism to young lives.

  29. Gaz says:

    Two weeks’ notice? C’mon, this was the chance to go nuts and do the “cleanse the temple” thing.

  30. Poimier says:

    If it were a Catholic Church – flamethrower, immense purgative properties.

    Meanwhile the soppy Presbie dithers for fear of offending …who pray ?

    Time for a wake-up says I.

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