I am SO INSPIRED to see a bishop doing civil disobedience. This is not about being right or safe or anything like that, it is about being prophetic and we have all played it far too safe for far too long. Thank you good bishop for risking something for what you see as right....

If there is any hope for reaching more people w/ the Gospel (and perhaps, incidentally, getting them to join TEC), it will be because of the witness of those like the Packards. God bless you, +George, Brook---and Fr John!

JC Fisher

"Go and do likewise" (Where's my mirror? ;-/)

Prayers from Pasadena.

Susan Russell

At last, an Episcopal statement that speaks volumes more than any trite letter by the PB or long-winded Defense of the Patron Parish from the Bishop of New York. How inspiring.

Bishop Packard ROCKS. I am so proud of him and all the Episcopalians (I know Michael Sniffen is one of them) who are taking a huge risk for the Gospel. There is the 'right' thing to do and there's the 'good' thing to do. Trinity has chosen neither. They have, instead, chosen the 'safe' thing to do.

I'm so glad that Mary and Joseph did not check with their real estate agents and financial consultants, much less their families or theologians, before they said 'Yes' to the Incarnation.

From Mt. Desert Island in Maine I stand with you, George Packard.
It is hard to do confrontation with one's friends.
The people and clergy of Trinity are our friends.
Yet.
The cause is right.
Trinity Wall Street is a beautiful place with beautiful people who do a lot for those in need.
This century needs more than that.
Thank you Bishop Packard for seeing the need and stepping forward.
Maybe one aspect of Jesus' movement is to occupy the world.
Not as we have done for 2000 years, 2,000,000,000 tears.
Not with rice and guns.
Just with our peaceful voices and bodies.
We shall not be moved from the earth because it belongs to us all.
The world does not belong to the 1%.
What is it that they don't understand about the word "all?"
Blessings always.
George Swanson
george@katrinasdream.org

What others have said about Bishop Packard and Father Merz. They make me proud.

June Butler

But what is the goal here? If the goal has something to do with income inequality, how does civil disobedience against Trinity Wall Street further that goal? It seems to me that Bishop Packard and OWS took their eye off the ball and instead decided to fight a side battle.

Should Trinity have decided to do something different? Maybe. But is this the best use of protesters' time and energy? I'm not so sure.

Laura Toepfer

Re the "side battle", Laura, I think it was a worthy effort. And as Bishop Packard said, "OWS has a deep bench and a very long attention span."

I appreciate Bishop Packard's willingness to put his own body on the line, and certainly all of this is a useful challenge to the liberalism of many Episcopal parishes like Trinity, which preach a kind of social justice that somehow mysteriously never manages to challenge the structural status quo.

But...many of us here probably attend parishes whose liberalism has similar boundaries, and there is a lot of stone-throwing-in-glass houses going on in that Times article. Not to mention that the Occupy encampments come with lots of problems, and few of us would probably want to live next door to one of them. My biggest problem with the movement is how somehow a campaign against Wall Street morphed into a campaign against municipal governments and those of us who live in urban neighborhoods.

Phillip Gentry

I'm reading about today's events while trying to work on my sermon for tomorrow, and all I can think of is:

"he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty."

My take here: https://gracerector.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/occupy-trinity-church/

Jonathan Grieser

Sometimes you have to stop analyzing and assessing and considering all the sides and simply act. For goodness sake, are we just talking heads or are we actually supposed to DO SOMETHING? I believe that Jesus will understand errors in judgment but I wonder if he will understand our over-intellectualizing that leads to paralysis and our avoidance of taking some kind of responsibility for making change that just might lead to the Reign of God.

Sometimes you have to stop analyzing and assessing and considering all the sides and simply act. For goodness sake, are we just talking heads or are we actually supposed to DO SOMETHING? I believe that Jesus will understand errors in judgment but I wonder if he will understand our over-intellectualizing that leads to paralysis and our avoidance of taking some kind of responsibility for making change that just might lead to the Reign of God.

Some part of me wants to read the Rector's letter in a whiny voice verging on the shrill. "We do nice things for poor people, but this is inconvenient, so go away."
I think the real issue here is that Trinity is a Chapel of Ease for the 1% and doesn't want to risk losing big donors trying to buy their way into heaven.
Same with the Presiding Bishops missive, "Please don't make us put our multi million dollar facilities where our mouths are."
I have yet to hear of any pastoral action about the people who wrecked our economy and waltzed off with even more money. Nothing about the bank execs who got "bailed out" and took huge bonuses. Surely to God at least one of them is an Episcopalian, and surely to God rapacious greed like this could fall under "notorious and evil."
This isn't a "side event" this is what lies at the heart of the theological issue ahead of us:
So, what is the Episcopal Church going to be? A House of Prayer, or a den of thieves?

My friends in touch with OWS jail support tell me the bishop has been released. I believe most of his fellow protesters will be released/arraigned tomorrow. No word on John Merz.

God bless you, good Bishop. Where's those Anglo-Catholic Socialists? Will this bring them all out of the woodwork? Is this the beginning? I hope so.

The vacant lot has no facilities to sustain a winter encampment. In good conscience and faith, we strongly believe to do so would be wrong, unsafe, unhealthy, and potentially injurious.

Could the Rector be right?

Of course he could.

However, this "Don't worry your pretty, radical heads---in loco parentis, we, the Wall Street Established, have decided" 'tude fairly DRIPS w/ 1% privilege.

"Occupy Wall Street" is about occupying our own lives: making our own mistakes, if need be.

The 99% is sick and tired of having decisions made FOR them!

JC Fisher

JC Fisher: There is such a thing as a legitimate concern for health and safety that are apart of both government and the Church in it's legal responsibilities. Or do you think that some sort of anarcho-syndicalism is somehow sustainable?One of the chief issues here is that the concerns raised by the Rector were either being dealt with or the Parish could have assisted in the implementation of work around. Part of living in a civels ociety is that people make decisions by the consent of those involved. This part of the 99% wants to have more say over who and how decisions are made, but wants no part of some direct democracy pipe dream. Athens should serve as a warning, not an example.

Mr. Robison, it might be easier for people to swallow the cautious responsibility spin if TWS weren’t sitting on billions of dollars of Manhattan real estate and an endowment that dwarfs many municipal budgets. There’s hardly a danger of the church being sued into oblivion because someone loses a toe to frostbit or if a a schizophrenic homeless person commits a crime.

TWS could easily afford to donate the property in whole to OWS and hardly see a ripple in their portfolio.

No one whose eyes are open and whose ears are listening is buying the self-defensive nonsense of one of the wealthiest parishes in NYC. Their concern is for their Wall Street vestry members and the neighborhood businesses and not the OWS revolutionaries.

It doesn't hurt to remember it's still >Ptheir