The Pope on Panhandling: Give Without Worry
New Yorkers, if not city dwellers everywhere, might acknowledge a debt to Pope Francis this week. He has offered a concrete, permanently useful prescription for dealing with panhandlers.
It’s this: Give them the money, and don’t worry about it.
The pope’s advice, from an interview with a Milan magazine published just before the beginning of Lent, is startlingly simple. It’s scripturally sound, yet possibly confounding, even subversive.
Living in the city — especially in metropolises where homelessness is an unsolved, unending crisis — means that at some point in your day, or week, a person seeming (or claiming) to be homeless, or suffering with a disability, will ask you for help.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/opinion/the-pope-on-panhandling-give-without-worry.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region
I love the Social Gospel.