By CANDICE M. GIOVE
Posted: 1:23 AM, January 22, 2012
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.
cgiove@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/god_awful_ows_mob_VqPjFDW0n234NhA9hxsxnL
