It's not just the Roman Catholic princes

In a June 10 Truthdig article on Jesuit activist Dan Berrigan, Chris Hedges writes about Trinity Church (also known as Trinity Wall Street), the third-largest landowner in Manhattan.

Hedges tells how Berrigan joined others in Zuccotti Park to ask Trinity to drop charges against Occupy activists for occupying an empty lot owned by the church. They wanted to set up a new Liberty Square after police threw them out of Zuccotti Park last November. Trinity's response: arrest the demonstrators. It refused to drop charges, and eight of the 65 protestors went on trial today. They could get a three-month jail sentence.

Hedges reports that the rector of Trinity, Rev. Dr. James Cooper, "earns$1.3 million a year, lives in a $5.5 million SoHo townhouse, receives a church allowance to maintain his Florida condo, dips into church funds to take his family on African safaris and oversees the church’s $1 billion in Manhattan real estate holdings from which the church receives as much as $30 million a year. He spent $5 million on a public relations campaign, nearly double the $2.7 million the church gave out in grants, in one year. Ten of the church’s 22-member vestry—its board of directors—have quit over Cooper’s authoritarianism and extravagance."

Hedges writes In conclusion that Cooper "has turned Trinity Church into a temple to greed. He is an appropriate priest for Wall Street."