Officers Oust Militants Holding Church

Sheriff’s deputies armed with clubs today broke into a church and arrested seven dissident church members and union leaders who had barricaded themselves inside for several weeks to protest “corporate evil.”

Authorities said there was no resistance from those inside Trinity Lutheran Church, and Clairton Police Chief Kenneth Ujevich said there were no injuries among the four men and three women arrested, including the wife of the church’s jailed pastor.

The group had controlled the church since the Rev. D. Douglas Roth was jailed Nov. 13 for refusing church and then court orders to step down from the pulpit. His congregation became sharply divided by his sermons, in which he criticized local corporations, blaming them for the steel-making area’s high unemployment.

A core of hard-liners barricaded themselves inside after a judge ordered them Dec. 21 to surrender the church to the Lutheran Church in America.

Allegheny County Sheriff Eugene Coon and dozens of sheriff’s deputies wearing blue jump suits surrounded the church around dawn today.

Coon called out to those inside: “Those of you inside the church, do you hear me? . . . You have a court order to vacate. Open the doors and come out.”

There was no response from inside the church.

The deputies then used a crowbar to break into a wooden rear door and unchained a second, glass door.

Ujevich said he and about six or eight deputies entered the church and met those inside. “They made a few remarks, but that’s all,” he said.

Ujevich said the group’s baseball bats, which had been brandished in recent weeks outside the church, were laid on the side of a room and were not used.