NEWEST NEWS
Easter services:
Good Friday services at both St. Hilda's and St. Lawrence's, at 2pm.
Easter Day:
8am services of Holy Communion at BOTH St. Lawrence's and St. Hilda's.
9:30am Easter Eucharist at St. Lawrence's.
11am Easter Eucharist at St. Hilda's.
6pm Evensong services at BOTH St. Hilda's and St. Lawrence's.
There WILL be a service of Night Prayer at St. Lawrence's at 8pm.
Recent published articles by Fr. Tim Jones concerning poverty in modern Britain
Letter to the York Press, 12th January 2010
My pre-Christmas sermon was deliberately phrased to shock because, generally, we are comfortably blind to the suffering of the destitute, and deaf to those who call it to our attention.
Anyone who has heard or read the sermon in full knows what was said, which was not that "shoplifting is okay for the poor". The message is simple and unremarkable. When people who have nothing experience delay in their benefits, they can move temporarily but swiftly from relative poverty to absolute poverty.
We all need to support each other better, stop despising people for being poor, and make sure that nobody has to wait several weeks for their meagre benefits. Failure in all that tempts people towards crime, and everyone suffers. Shoplifting is wrong and harmful; burglary, mugging, prostitution and self-harm – including neglect – are even more so. For the love of God, let’s make sure that people always have better options. Sometimes they don’t, and that is a disgrace.
Article in the Church Times, 31st December 2009
CONTRARY to what has been reported, I did not quite tell the poor to shoplift. I pointed out the inadequacies of the benefits system, the collapse of the family for many people as the basic and proper unit of social support, and the inadequacy of charitable giving by British people, including British Christians, for people in severe need. These failings mean that some people experience periods when they have no legal means of obtaining adequate resources.
What is the proper advice to give to people when they have no legal means of support? Christian thinkers — Ambrose, Chrysostom, Aquinas, for example — have, over the centuries, agreed on the basic theological principles for this abiding human situation: when adequate charity fails to materialise, someone in genuine need is permitted to take frugally from another’s abundance, giving the legal owner the benefit of the doubt that he or she would have eventually made the loving, sacrificial, morally correct decision.
Aquinas makes it clear that such taking (in the case of genuine need) is not, in a technical moral sense, theft, and therefore not a breach of the eighth commandment.
Most people recognise the truth of this in practice, even if they struggle with it in theory. For example, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, most people were able immediately to make a distinction between those who were stealing TV sets and those who were scavenging in the wreckage of grocery stores for anything that was edible.
Hurricane Katrina was a communal disaster; but the moral parameters for people living in extremis are not greatly different whether they experience disaster personally or in common with the rest of the community.
The real scandal is that the community — particularly the Christian community, given our calling — fails adequately to support people in desperate need. That failure sometimes pushes people beyond a point where they have legal options. Their remaining options may no longer be legal, but they are none the less still required, before God, to make their choices on a moral basis.
Lawmakers and law enforcers must, of course, tell them to operate within the law. But a priest has a higher calling: to help people in the reality of their lives to make good moral choices. There is a distinction to be made between what is legal and what is moral.
Practically, there can be no general law permitting people to shoplift if they think their circumstances merit it. Instead, a moral society is required to have robust laws to protect the innocent from vice; but it is also required to be discerning, and exercise the virtue of mercy whenever it is appropriate to do so. The development of compulsory minimum sentencing is therefore altogether destructive to the common good.
To suggest that these problems are solved by telling all those in trouble just to pop down to the Salvation Army for a hearty meal and a food parcel is to demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of how complex life is for people at the very bottom. As a society, we should do better by them, as quickly as possible.
But, while they wait, what do we imagine their options really are? We can, indeed, start by telling them to go get the help they deserve and are entitled to. Almost nobody is talking about what practical moral advice a Christian should give when that help is not properly there.