Occupy Group Faults Church, a Onetime Ally
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER
For months, they were the best of neighbors: the slapdash champions of economic equality, putting down stakes in an outdoor plaza, and the venerable Episcopal parish next door, whose munificence helped sustain the growing protest.
But in the weeks since Occupy Wall Street was evicted from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, relations between the demonstrators and Trinity Wall Street, a church barely one block from the New York Stock Exchange, have reached a crossroads.
The displaced occupiers had asked the church, one of the city’s largest landholders, to hand over a gravel lot, near Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, for use as an alternate campsite and organizing hub. The church declined, calling the proposed encampment “wrong, unsafe, unhealthy and potentially injurious.”
And now the Occupy movement, after weeks of targeting big banks and large corporations, has chosen Trinity, one of the nation’s most prominent Episcopal parishes, as its latest antagonist.
“We need more; you have more,” one protester, Amin Husain, 36, told a Trinity official on Thursday, during an impromptu sidewalk exchange between clergy members and demonstrators. “We are coming to you for sanctuary.”
Trinity’s rector, the Rev. James H. Cooper, defended the church’s record of support for the protesters, including not only expressions of sympathy, but also meeting spaces, resting areas, pastoral services, electricity, bathrooms, even blankets and hot chocolate. But he said the church’s lot — called Duarte Square — was not an appropriate site for the protesters, noting that “there are no basic elements to sustain an encampment.”
“Trinity has probably done as much or more for the protesters than any other institution in the area,” Mr. Cooper wrote on his parish Web site. “Calling this an issue of ‘political sanctuary’ is manipulative and blind to reality. Equating the desire to seize this property with uprisings against tyranny is misguided, at best. Hyperbolic distortion drives up petition signatures, but doesn’t make it right.”
The criticism of Trinity was coming not only from protesters, but even from some Episcopal priests and other Protestant clergy members.
“Trinity Church had a fantastic opportunity to be a Christlike presence by openings its doors to the protesters,” said the Rev. Milind Sojwal, the rector of All Angels Church, an Episcopal parish on the Upper West Side. “And I believe Trinity blew it.”
On Thursday, some church leaders and protesters brought a Nativity scene to Trinity’s main entrance on Broadway, with a sign attached. “There was no room for them in the inn,” it read in part. “Trinity has plenty of room.”
Occupy Wall Street plans to hold a demonstration on Saturday at the lot. Some clergy members have said they planned to attend, and a handful said they may join protesters who have discussed taking down the fences around the lot, risking arrest.
“I’m willing to occupy space in an act of civil disobedience in order to shine a light on social and economic injustice,” said the Rev. John Merz, of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Trinity is not the first Anglican church to grapple with how to respond to the Occupy movement. In London, protesters have camped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral for weeks, and the city has sought to evict them.
So vexing is Trinity’s dilemma that one of the world’s most prominent Anglicans, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has issued two statements on the matter: one posted on the Occupy Wall Street Web site, imploring Trinity to “find a way to help” the protesters, and a second, posted on the Trinity Web site, in which Archbishop Tutu said his comments were “not to be used to justify breaking the law.”
Bishop Mark S. Sisk, the Episcopal bishop of New York, and Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the top official of the denomination nationally, issued statements on Friday supporting Trinity’s position.
“It is regrettable that Occupy members feel it necessary to provoke potential legal and police action by attempting to trespass on other parish property,” Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori said. “Seekers after justice have more often achieved success through nonviolent action, rather than acts of force or arms. I would urge all concerned to stand down and seek justice in ways that do not further alienate potential allies.”
Older than the country in which it stands, Trinity has a long and storied history. Alexander Hamilton was once a pew holder. The church shook, amid a storm of debris, as the towers of the World Trade Center fell.
Less known, though, is the church’s status as a real estate titan. Since 1705, when Queen Anne of England bequeathed more than 200 acres of what was then farmland to the church, Trinity Real Estate has come to control six million square feet of property, much of it office space around Hudson Square, financing an operation most parishes could never fathom.
“No matter how supportive they may appear to Occupy, no matter how much hospitality they show to Occupy, Trinity Wall Street owns a lot of Lower Manhattan,” said Jim Naughton, a longtime observer of Episcopal Church issues who works as a partner at Canticle Communications, a public relations firm. “They’re vulnerable in that regard.”
On Nov. 15, hours after they were driven from Zuccotti Park, many Occupy Wall Street protesters reconvened at Duarte Square, which some knew to be Trinity’s property. Even before the eviction, protesters had asked that Trinity allow them to use the space, said Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for the group.
A portion of Duarte Square, a small sidewalk with leafless trees, is public. But Trinity owns a larger area that is filled with wooden benches and shrubbery. The private area is currently vacant, enclosed by a locked chain-link fence, but the church says it has licensed the property through April 2013 to a nonprofit arts organization, which holds occasional art exhibitions there.
Critics argued that Trinity’s resources and influence carried with them an added responsibility. The Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in West Harlem, noted that many churches hung signs from their chapels, welcoming passers-by.
And the Rev. Michael Ellick, of Judson Memorial Church, a Greenwich Village congregation affiliated with the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ, said Trinity needed to do more.
“Charity is not enough,” Mr. Ellick said. “Charity keeps things the same.”
Some clergy, though, said Trinity had already exceeded its Christian obligations.
“Trinity has been more than accommodating to a marginal group of protesters,” said the Rev. J. Douglas Ousley, of the Church of the Incarnation in Murray Hill, an Episcopal parish.
And Robert Bruce Mullin, a professor at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, said it was easy for other churches to criticize Trinity’s use of its property.
“It’s cheap grace,” he said. “It’s great to defend the rights of protesters in someone else’s backyard.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 17, 2011
An earlier version of a caption with this article misstated the proximity of Trinity Wall Street’s vacant lot to the New York Stock Exchange.
The big money came from Unions and other communist front groups. Of course no one can account for that money, who spent it or who banked it. Couldn't have been the 'organizers'. There weren't any, right? 
