Occupying [Episcopal] Churches

By Mark Tooley
12.16.11

Anything to boost attendance, cynics would say.

With fewer and fewer people attending the spiraling Episcopal Church, some prelates seem to see opening the doors to Wall Street Occupiers as a potential solution.

Since Occupiers lost their protest encampment at Boston's Dewey Square, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts has hospitably opened the doors of its Cathedral Church of St. Paul to the Occupiers to perpetuate the "conversation" about social justice.

"The issues raised by the Occupy movement are important to be discussing in society, and so I'm happy to offer our cathedral to provide hospitality and a venue so those conversations can continue," enthusiastically chimed cathedral dean the Very Reverend Jep Streit. According the diocesan website, Occupation "general assemblies" would begin at the cathedral on December 13 and would continue three times a week.

At such a rate, perhaps Occupation rallies will become more frequent at the cathedral than worship services. Or perhaps for leftist "social justice" churches, demonstrations for governmentally orchestrated massive income redistribution are themselves a form of worship.

The Episcopal cathedral in Boston seems to resemble what comedian Flip Wilson once spoofed in the early 1970s as the "Church of What's Happening Now." Rev. Strait boasts on his cathedral website that this church named for the Apostle Paul resembles a "United Nations gathering" and holds weekly Muslim prayer meetings. One canon priest, he notes, is quite "disciplined" in yoga practice. And "ancient church traditions" mix with "urban grooves" at the cathedral's "emerging church worship community." No doubt. the rest

The prelates and theologians who eagerly invest Occupy Wall Street with transcendent authority almost all share a common spiritual ennui. No longer enlivened by the drama of their own faith's teachings about divine redemption, they instead look for excitement in the bedraggled camps of unemployed twenty-somethings a fraction of their own age. The Occupiers will eventually get bored with their own tedium and move on. But will their ecclesial admirers?