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	Charges against Two Church Vigil Participants Dropped in Municipal Court By Susan Finch Times-Picayune January 7, 2009 http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/01/charges_against_two_church_vig.html [Parishioners keeping vigil have been been arrested, with charges subsequently dropped, in the Boston archdiocese on 11/6/04 ( 1 2 3 ), and 12/25/04 ( 4 5), and in the New York archdiocese on 2/12/07 ( 6 7 8 ). Numbers link to source articles.] Two parishioners charged with criminal trespass and resisting arrest Tuesday at Our Lady of Good Counsel church in Uptown New Orleans as a result of their roles in a protest vigil saw the charges dropped today in Municipal Court. Attorneys for novelist Poppy Brite and businessman Hunter Harris Sr., participants in an effort to prevent the shuttering of their church, said the charges were dropped by the City Attorney's Office. If convicted, the pair could have faced as much as six months in jail. "According to the city attorney, they didn't want to arrest anyone, but they felt like they had no choice," said attorney Scott Shea, representing Brite. "They just decided in their best interest not to pursue these cases, and obviously we agree." Brite and Harris were arrested and charged Tuesday when they refused orders to leave Good Counsel, one of two Uptown churches where parishioners conducted an around-the-clock vigil for more than nine weeks in resistance to an archdiocese consolidation plan. A similar episode played out at St. Henry's church, where one protester was given a Municipal Court summons by police who shut down a vigil there. Archbishop Alfred Hughes had ordered the two church closed and the merger of their parish communities with a third. Assistant City Attorney Gerard Archer and Sarah Comiskey, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, declined immediate comment after the short-circuited arraignment proceeding at Municipal Court. A judge never took up the charges. The archdiocese reported that Hughes was out of town Wednesday on a regularly scheduled retreat with other Louisiana bishops. Archdiocese officials asked police to intervene and remove vigil participants at the two churches after a long-standing strategy of taking no direct action against protesters. An attorney for Harris, Rick Tessier, said Wednesday he didn't believe archdiocese officials "thought it through very well. The only people Jesus kicked out of the church were the money-changers ... If Jesus were around today, I think Jesus would have something to say about it." Tessier said he believes the true cause of the dismissal of the municipal charges was that "Archbishop Hughes didn't want to get on the stand and explain why he's going to arrest people of his faith." In 2004, in a similar church-closure struggle, leaders of the Archdiocese of Boston asked local police to clear protesters from two churches, then asked local prosecutors to drop charges against several parishioners who were arrested.
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