Ecumenical News

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were given a two-week’s notice to leave a Presbyterian Church on the upper west side of Manhattan after having moved a $13,000 baptismal without permission.

The Rev. Bob Brashear of West Park Presbyterian Church on W. 86th Street noticed the vessel and its lid missing while he was preparing for a Sunday morning service. The night before, Brashear had allowed some 60 occupiers to take shelter in the church’s sanctuary.

After giving the occupiers 24 hours to find the baptismal, the vessel was found in a small room connected to the church, although the lid remains missing. The occupiers have been told to vacate the church premises within two weeks.

Brashear told the New York Post that even when the church had opened its doors in the 1980’s to drug addicts that no one had moved the vessel before.

“Not even crackheads messed with that,” he said.

In a similar incident across the East River, occupiers being housed at Park Slope Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn roused emotions after one of them urinated inside of the church and the fluid came into contact with a cross.

“It was like pissing on the 99 percent,” the occupiers were reportedly told.