British Priest’s Situation Ethics: Location Decides if Theft’s Immoral

A Church of England priest sparked a row Saturday by saying he approves of shoplifting from supermarkets.

The Rev. John Papworth told parishioners at a meeting to discuss crime that large supermarkets are destroying community life and that it is therefore justifiable to steal from them.

“I don’t regard it as stealing. I regard it as a badly needed reallocation of economic resources,” Papworth said.

Britain’s supermarket chains have put small grocers out of business, created unemployment and encouraged greed and consumerism with their advertising campaigns, he argued.

Papworth said he was not encouraging people to shoplift, although “if people wander in and wander out without paying for the stuff, I think it is a perfectly comprehensible action.”

“With these institutions, all you are confronted with are these boardroom barons sitting round the boardroom plotting how to take the maximum amount of money out of people’s pockets for the minimum in return,” he said on BBC Radio.

His remarks were immediately denounced by the Church of England.

“He clearly does not speak for the Church of England, and indeed his comments have already been disowned by his bishop and his vicar,” a church spokesman told the BBC.

Home Secretary Michael Howard joined the condemnation, calling Papworth’s comments “disgraceful.”

But Papworth, a 75-year-old part-time priest in the wealthy north London district of St. John’s Wood, was unrepentant.

“Jesus said love your neighbor; he didn’t say love Marks & Spencers,” he said, referring to one of Britain’s biggest chain store groups.

“When you talk about stealing, you can only steal from a person, you can only have a moral relationship with a person, you don’t have a moral relationship with things--that is a power relationship,” he said.

The current flap is not the first time Papworth has run into controversy. He was imprisoned in the 1960s along with philosopher Bertrand Russell for his part in a campaign against nuclear weapons and was also jailed in the U.S. for taking part in a march for black rights.